Article:		Building My MythTV Box, Part 1: Hardware
Subject:		digital TV
Date:		2005-06-29 00:54:21
From:		vadalus
"For the foreseeable future, I plan to keep my life relatively simple by relying on digital TV received over the air. The back-end resource requirement for a system that only receives digital TV is not taxing at all. Digital TV is already digitized for your convenience, so all that the recorder needs to do is to save the bit stream from the airwaves onto the disk." It's all very well writing this to disk but until you have a Cable card-ready capture card (Re: not for a long time) you'll not be able to do much with the data!

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• digital TV - broadcast (ATSC) is not encrypted, unlike digital cable
  2005-07-01 10:28:00  Matthew Gast [Reply | View]
  
  
  Unlike digital cable, broadcast digital TV (ATSC) is not encrypted. The raw transport stream is easily saved to disk, recovered, and transcoded.
  
  There isn't a good way to work "natively" with digital cable. The least unattractive option is to use a set-top box for decryption and feed the video stream to a capture card. At this point, though, the only capture cards you can buy are standard definition. You'll also need to use an IR blaster to send channel changing commands to the set-top box.
  
  Let's hope that the broadcast flag's chilling effects won't stop high-definition capture cards or a CableCard capture cards!