I'm subscribed to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list. Yesterday there was a post by John Gilmore (http://www.toad.com/gnu/) about the pcHDTV HD-3000 card ($190) which will be outlawed by the FCC in July 2005, as ridiculous as that sounds. Read his message below for more.
Get em while they're hot. John Hebert PS: If there is a lot of interested in this card, we could possibly get a bulk discount (http://www.pchdtv.com/faq.php#faq0000004). Message: 4 Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:49:38 -0800 From: John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] pcHDTV HD-3000 card is shipping; easy HDTV To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For people who want to decode HDTV in hardware rather than with GNU Radio software, this board is now shipping. It does NOT honor the broadcast flag, and will therefore be illegal to manufacture after July, 2005 [if the FCC's power-grab for authority to regulate how receivers for radio signals are built is upheld by the courts]. GNU Radio is not a practical way to watch HDTV. It takes a long time to capture and decode the data stream -- like 40x as long as the show, last time we timed it. We built it to show that an open source implementation CAN work. We could speed it up in various ways, but we've had other things to do (like pushing the USRP hardware out). This card IS a practical way to watch HDTV on Linux. It's supported by MythTV and other free video and PVR (personal video recorder) software. The HD-3000 card is only good for receiving analog TV and HDTV, as far as I know. But the drivers are all open source, and hardware is often designed with "bypass" modes for debugging, which disable entire blocks of the chip (such as the ATSC decoder) and permit raw signals to be observed by software. There may well be a way to configure it to tune in and digitize other signals of interest. This 5V PCI card costs $190 in single quantities, with volume discounts available: http://www.pchdtv.com/hd_3000.html Here's more info about the lawsuit against the FCC's "broadcast flag" regulation, American Library Association v. FCC. The FCC not only claims a power to dictate the design of receivers (which it has never claimed before), and then uses that power to dictate what kinds of equipment the reciver is 'permitted' to convey the received signal to. This 'permission' results in the FCC regulating a wide variety of devices that can be plugged into a receiver. The FCC delayed imposing rules that would outlaw GNU Radio, because they knew they were on shaky ground there. Librarians, consumer groups, Public Knowledge, lobbyists like the Center for Democracy and Technology, and EFF sued: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/?f=broadcastflag.html Here's more about the Broadcast Flag itself: http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/ John __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Check out the new Yahoo! Front Page. www.yahoo.com
