Greg Woods wrote:
On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 09:02 -0400, Brian Stults wrote:
Donavan Stanley wrote:
You don't USE a cable box with QAM.
This really surprised me. I bought an HD3000 a long time ago to get it
before the FCC deadline. However, I haven't used it yet because I
thought I would need to get another cable box to use QAM. So the tuner
in the HD3000 can receive channels in the hundreds?
What Donovan means (I think) is that cable companies do not generally
provide HD over QAM. Yes, the HD3000 card will do QAM. But it's not a
good card for that, because all the encoding is in software (which puts
a high load on your CPU), and none of the content is HD. If you want to
receive QAM signals, a PVR-150 or other MPEG2-encoder card is better.
The HD3000 will receive HD OTA programming. If you want to get HD from
your cable company, you will need a cable box that outputs unencrypted
content over FireWire. From what I have read on this list, this is the
only way to get HD content off of cable, and you will be fortunate if
you can get a box like this from your local provider. Of course the
people at the local office will have no clue what you're talking about
if you ask them about any of this either. From what I've been able to
gather, if I ever want to do real HD content, I will have to go to
satellite or settle for what comes OTA.
BTW, I too learned all this the hard way, after buying an HD3000 to beat
the FCC deadline. Only then did I learn that it's not the right card for
me. It worked with the QAM signal, but the PVR-150 works better and
costs less. At some point, I may experiment with some antennas to try
and get OTA HD using the HD3000. I've read here that you don't
necessarily need a large rooftop antenna, people have done it with cheap
$20 HD antennas from Radio Shack. Whether that will work for me (or for
you) will depend on reception conditions in our respective areas, and
whether our machines can handle the load of capturing and displaying an
HD stream.
--Greg
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With all due respect, this is pretty much wrong. QAM is the method the
cable companies use to carry signals to your house. It has nothing to
do with HD/SD.
The cable company can send either scrambled or unscrambled signals over
QAM. In order to receive the scrambled signals, you need a Cable box or
a CableCard. However, in order to receive the unscrambled QAM signals,
you simply need a QAM-capable tuner. That's where the HD3000 comes in.
Most early ATSC (i.e., HD) tuners did not support QAM. If you plugged
in your cable line to the card, you would get nothing. However, the
newer cards let you capture QAM as well. It will also let you record
OTA programming if you use an antenna. There is no "decoding" because
the HD stream is already digital - the card simply saves it to the hard
drive.
The PVR-150/250/350/500 will only let you receive SD. Yes, they do QAM.
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