High Def TV

StevieB

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I'm sure when you read the title of this post, you thought I have posted in the wrong section, but please bear with me.

Hopefully in the next couple of months, I would like to buy a media centre pc of some sort, and intend to channel my Sky Digital through it.

This shouldn't cause any problems, but my question is this, What happens when Sky go over to High Def TV?

Will I still be able to put this through my media centre?
The reason I say this, is because of all the stories about Sky trying to stop us recording broadcasts, and that supposedly their new HDTV box (made by Thomson) will similar to Sky+

Can anyone shed any light on this for me, as I don't want to go out and spend money of one of these pc's to find in 12months time it has become useless?

Thanks.
 
Using Sky with an HTPC entails capturing the analogue output of a digibox as Sky will not allow digital satellite tuner cards that utilise its encryption. Most people using Sky with an HTPC will be capturing with a decent capture card and recording to hard drive .

They may also have an IR transciever on the PC that can effectively control the digibox from an EPG to allow timed recordings to be made. The easiest cards to use for this seem to be the haupage winTV ones with on board mpeg2 encoders to make the size of the recordings more managable. There are some people who like these cards and some people who say hey suck ..haven't seen one in action myself but I doubt the mpeg2 encoder is all that great and the cards themselves seem to clip at 16 and 235 ( not terrible but hardly wanted).

This particular method is going to be little use for hidef , the best it will do is record a standard def output from a sky hidef box ( if they allow it to alos output an additional sd picture). Recording hidef is actually quite difficult unless you are able to dump the bitsream straight to an HD which SKY currently don't let anyone do. The only other solution is to record via and hdmi capable DVHS machine ( if SKY let you) or capture the analogue output from the box ( if SKY make this functional for any length of time) and this requires a very expensive capture card that most likely still compresses the footage to move it across the PCI bus quickly enough. ( lot of money for a far from transparent image pipeline)

I'm hoping that SKY will have SKY+ boxes with meaningfully large harddrives to cope with HD recording.

I can't see much reason to use an HTPC with SKY unless its just to deinterlace and scale a standard definition image through Dscaler.
 
I know we're only talking if's, but's and maybe's but assuming that it is a la Sky+ and you can record in hidef onto the internal HDD, is there any way to link the IDE (?) cable from said HDD to your pc? Or can you not record in hi-def due to bandwidth?

Just spitballing is all.

Bigfatsi
 
If Sky HD is going to be like Sky+, the stuff on the HDD will be encrypted, and has to be played out through the decoder in the Sky box.
 

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