Re: [tlug] LinVDR hardware in Japan

[Patrick Niessen <patrick.niessen@example.com>]

On Thursday 03 April 2003 16:50, Marcus Metzler wrote:
> The Japanese digital TV standard is very different from the European
> DVB and the American ATSC. Although the all use MPEG2 transport streams to
> convey the audio and video streams, the encapsulation of service
> information differs. In addition they all use different modulation
> methods to transmit the signal. This requires different frontends
> (i.e. tuner and modulator) for each system, which means new
> drivers. Furthermore, in the US and Japan you have HDTV content in
> digital television, which requires an MPEG decoder that can handle
> these resolutions or, if decoded in software, a fast CPU.
> Apart from the DVB drivers for the European/Australien cards
> (www.linuxtv.org or www.metzlerbros.de) there is the Gnu Radio
> Project, which managed to tune, demodulate and decode an ATSC signal
> with  the help of a (very expensiv) AD-Converter
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/gnuradio.html).
> I haven't seen anything for the Japanese standard ( I think it is
> called ISDB) yet.

I think ISDB is only for terrestrial, from what I picked up on google.  It 
being a PerfecTV subscriber, I also know that this company does not broadcast 
any HDTV (wouldn't make sense anyway, as they mainly repeat movies and TV 
series that are not available in the HDTV format).  BS sattelite and 
BS-Digital are HDTV capable though.

I thought that some decoder cards actually support the Japanese standard, but 
according to you due to the lack of drivers, the hardware will not be much 
use to me.  That brings me to the question if there any other alternative 
stream inputs planned for the Linux projects?  If I could use DV via 
Firewire, or analog mpeg encoder cards / usb boxes to feed linVRB I could at 
least have a settop box for playback ...