[Gae]

This eBayer is selling a Technotrend/Hauppage CARDsaying it will receive BBC HD and he has also said to me via E-Mail that it will record BBC HD with the right software and optimal specs. I remain sceptical and wont buy it unless I'm 100% sure that it can do both of these things. Doesn't the card have to be DVB-S2 and be able to decode the
H264 codec or will recording the transport stream of the channel and playing it with VLC player work? It says it has the ability for "Raw data transfer: PCI Busmaster DMA"
Any ideas?
Thanks

Gae

HDTV uses MPEG4 and there is absolutely no mention of this with the card. I would be extremely surprised if this could receive, let alone record, Sky HD. There is no mention of HDCP support either. Avoid it.

[Gae]

Thanks. That's pretty much what I suspected. I guess I'll just have to consider getting SKY + after I get my SKY HD install next Saturday!!! Mind you, there are so many repeats, do I really need it?

Gae

[Justinrog]

I have a DVB-S card (not DVB-S2) in my PC and I can receive BBC-HD. It doesn't have HDCP either. For now, BBC-HD is transmitting in DVB-S and aditionally all you need is a good MPEG 4 codec. I believe there are no DVB cards with built in MPEG4 hardware acceleration yet. So, you need a really fast PC and a good AVC codec to watch it on your PC.

CoreVLC or Cyberlink H.264 Codec (if you can get NVidia hardware accel. to work) should be fine with a good system.

I have not tried this card though, but chances are good that it will work. My SkyStar 2 works fine.

J

[Chris Muriel]

Justinrog is correct.
The key statement is "with the right software and optimal specs."

Chris Muriel, Manchester

[Gae]

Hmmm.... I'll have to experiment with my Twinhan capture card then as I was picking up the BBC HD audio. Maybe I could record it and convert it to a transport stream and it might play? Or am I just being thick?

Gae

[Stephen Neal]

Originally Posted by PEHowland

HDTV uses MPEG4 and there is absolutely no mention of this with the card. I would be extremely surprised if this could receive, let alone record, Sky HD. There is no mention of HDCP support either. Avoid it.

Think you are misunderstanding what PC capture cards do - they just demodulate the RF signal into a transport stream, and in some cases filter out the various MPEG streams. They don't do anything to process the video or audio streams - unless they are the relatively rare high-end MPEG2 hardware decoding cards with their own video outputs - which aren't suitable for HD.

The PC itself does the MPEG2 or MPEG4 H264 decoding - not the card.

HDCP is purely a function of the DVI or HDMI output processing - it is not part of the broadcast itself - though in many implementations it is possible for the broadcaster in a closed broadcast system (like Sky HD - which the BBC are not really a part of, they are just compatible with it) to add a flag which forces the receiver / player to implement HDMI.

The key thing for the BBC HD trial is the broadcast modulation scheme. At the moment the BBC are using DVB-S (as they are sharing a transponder with two BBC One regional feeds) - however if they move to DVB-S2 and you have a DVB-S only card you'll be stuffed.