PC HDMI-IN capability and Closed Captions window

1) What is the current state of the availability of HDMI IN capability into the PC ?
Are there any reasonably priced PCI or PCI-E cards which are capable of receiving the HDMI output from the Cable Set To Box to allow the PC to receive a picture of a quality higher than the coax cable's 640x480 ?
Blackmagic's line of cards are not an affordable solution and do not solve the problem reliably.
This problem has existed for years now, yet the industry has failed to solve this and seems to be treading water and wasting money.

2) The industry also needs to be able to control the channel selection on the Cable Set Top Box directly from the PC through the USB cable.
Several set top boxes already have a USB connector built in.
Current infrared IR Blaster solutions are unreliable.

3) Another industry failure is a Tuner Card with software which has the capability to place the Closed Captions in a separate external windows, outside of the TV video window, also able to record Closed Captions and playback Closed Captions, again, in a separate external window.

I would like to see the Tuner card PC TV industry either solve these 3 problems or fire their engineers and stop wasting any more money on the nonsense being regurgitated year after year.

Pressure to deny the PC the full resolution of the cable signal ?
Ok, then why not downscale the signal to some lower resolution, such as 1440x900 in hardware, prior to feeding the signal into the pc ?
That would still be a lot better than 640x480.

The Hauppauge product does not mention anything about HDMI. Maybe the YCrCB signals could be used, as a stop gap measure. They claim it is capable of up to 1080i.
I see no information about whether Closed Captions are encoded into one of those 3 signals.

I know of no evidence that the set top box manufacturers have refused to provide an ability through the USB port to control the channel, pursuant to any request from TV Tuner card manufacturers or Microsoft directly.
In addition, without a protocol passing through the USB connection, it would be difficult to control a multiple of signals to generate. For example, picture in picture directly from the STB would require separate commands to control the signal on channel 3 and channel 4.

I tried the Avermedia IR Blaster and found that extremely unreliable for controlling the Set Top Box it was configured to control (Sci Atl 3250HD).

Closed Captions are the most important Value-Added when comparing PC TV to regular TV.
Within a separate window, it does not in any way obscure the TV picture window. It simply scrolls in the background and can be consulted after the fact. The old ATI software had this External Window feature, and provided Record/Playback capability of the Closed Captions.
And once saved in a separate file, the non-timing lines containing language words can be fed through a language translator and allow much enhanced portability of video content between people who speak different languages.
For instance a movie in Germany or soccer match in Brazil or a cricket match in India could be translated and watched by someone in another country using the Closed Captions, translated.

The TV Tuner industry should be working with Microsoft to make proposals to the Set Top Box manufacturers of a protocol between the PC and the Set Top Box through the USB connector.

How can you claim that customers do not want the higher resolution signals which are available fromt he Set Top Box routed into their PC ?
The marketplace of TVs which are capable of 1080p and 1080i is clear proof the higher resolution is in demand.

A problem only becomes a problem when it becomes an obstacle to marketplace demand. Higher resolutions will require increased demands on Gigabytes of storage, so there is a limiting factor to the resolutions to store. However, there would likely be an initial viewing resolution and then a PC re-processing of the video content to a lower resolution for long term storage when that is desired.

The usage of Infrared signaling for STB control indicates either laziness or incompetence on the part of TV Tuner cards. IR is useful for the person who is in differing positions in the viewing room, who is able to carry around a handset remote to change the channel. Line of Sight is a serious problem and even ambient light can interefere with that signal.
That is not what is needed for PC control of the STB, and it is much slower in changing the channel, since it is designed to match the timing of a finger pressing a button.

Another slowness issue I neglected to mention in the original message is simply the time the STB takes to change an ATSC channel. Currently it is about 3 seconds, compared to the half-second or 1/3 second changing the NTSC signal.
Attacking this problem would need to incorporate a USB connection controlling multiple tuner chips in the STB.

Everyone knows Microsoft is working with the TV Tuner card manufacturers. This was forced when ATI fell on its face over the past 5 years with hopeless software modification attempts to their software base and their crashing. That likely explains the lousy user interface software appearing in recent solutions for MCE and Vista, from companies like Avermedia.

Firewire is in a small number of PCs. USB is ubiquitous. In addition, the Firewire protocol does not have detailed semantics to control various internal tuners and other devices within the Set Top Box.

Wrong. The Set Top Box manufacturers should support a USB protocol, since that solution incorporates the STB. OCUR/CableCard solutions do not.

The PC is just another TV as far as the carrier like Comcast is concerned.
They stubbornly claim not to support PCs mainly because of the complexity and increased variables in the home not under their control.

Which tuners have this high resolution capability ?
OCUR is still stumbling out of the gate and so far only ATI has one and it is not available for broad distribution.

You claimed there was no demand for high resolution video into the PC. The PCTV is just another TV, and customers have proven their desire for hire resolutions TVs int he store with purchases of HDTVs.

HDMI is a much more powerful technology, able to transmit several sources at once and control various devices down the chain.

Stop gap, means that it may have to fill the bill until the HDMI functionality is implemented in a TV Tuner card.

What was the bit rate of the incoming data saved and more simply, how many Gigabytes per hour at 1080i from the Hauppauge HD device ?

Wrong. Why should Scientific Atlanta/Cisco or GS/Motorola spend money implementing an interface,such as USB channel/tuner control, nufacturer of a connecting device ? The TV Tuner manufacturers and Microsoft should write the spec and then present it to those 2 STB manufacturers.

How do you receive 2 channels from the Set Top Box withouta protocol to address the 2 channels you seek and the output channels to put them on ?

I did not say that ATI dropped the Closed Caption External Window capability. I say "old" since I have not used their recent software since it is full of bugs, enhances nothing and every successive ATI software release represents a huge waste of money not just for ATI/AMD, but also for the whole TV Tuner industry.
And that incompetence at ATI is what forced Microsoft to become as involved in this business as it is.
Most ATI customers are likely not even aware the Closed Captions External Window feature even exists.

The TV Tuner business was ATI's to lock up years ago. They failed to consolidate their advantage and for years there was chaos in the TV Tuner business.
With the explosion of video in the past few years, ATI should have veen in position to buy AMD, rather than the other way round. ATI's management crew should have been rounded up and fired on the day AMD took charge.

Are you saying that 1394 has commands which allow control of channels in out and tuners' frequencies ?

Content providers want to deny high resolution or want all their content denied to the PC ? Recording of content has been going on for decades.
The PC is just a new venue.

1) The OCUR non-STB solution is not available widely, is not distributed through major retail channels, requires CableCard, etc.
For high resolution video input to the PC, the only solution emanate from the Set Top Box.

2) Again, there are several arguments which need to be passed to the STB to control the 2 or more frequencies tuned, program which channels 2 or more Picture In Picture output signals should occupy, etc.
Infrared signaling is too slow.
PIP, faster channel changing, channel change reliable avoiding line of sight and ambient light interference, demand a reliable protocol between the PC and the STB.

Again, recording content is not new. Converting VHS tape to digital would simply be one simple step. Some boxes can/could convert VHS directly to CD.

You have to be kidding if you are expecting users to be content to watch only Clear Channel QAM signals.
Again, OCUR is falling flat on its face especially with incompetent ATI leading the OCUR way, and YCrCb seems to be the only other solution.
I am told that there is also audio/video on the 1394 connector from the STB, but have seen no universal software available to harvest that content.


Many people care about a reliable method to control the STB and Closed Captions, but these are not the sorts of issues you will see real users of these products talk about on an industry Echo Chamber like this forum.
Most people on forums like this go home to a real television and forget all about the stuff they discuss here after hours.
I have already mentioned big reasons why Closed Captions are important.
People do not use Closed Captions because they obscure the TV window picture, normally, and cannot be scrolled back (an hour or more), normally.

Much of these issues is governed by laws and Congressional pressure.
Right now, it is trivial to watch NTSC content on a PC. However, 15 years ago it was very difficult to find an NTSC signal which was not scrambled, requiring usage of the STB (formerly known as Descrambler) to see anything.
This prevented VCRs from operating, amongst other problems.
Congressional pressure and maybe clauses in the Communications Act, I forget which, forced the cable companies to free up these NTSC signals.
Now, every single NTSC signal in my cable is descrambled and in-the-clear.

However, it takes people focusing on some of these problems on forums like this and taking the problem to Washington, DC, for the public will to be carried out.

As I mentioned, NTSC signals were freed up from the Scrambler/Descrambler darkness around 10 years ago, and federal laws and/or regulations were responsible.
Are you saying that pleas from the disabled were responsible for the changes for NTSC 10 years ago ?

Wrong. The HDMI specification allows for routing and control of signals through a network or topology of cabling.
Some HDMI equipment may opt out of implementing this functionality. That should not be allowed.

5-9 GBytes per hour of user storage is excessive for long term storage.
Hopefully the Hauppauge product is delivered with video conversion software to downscale to something like 640x480 or 720x480 at 1 Mbps for safekeeping.

Selling an STB to to the cable carrier per every spare PC with a simple NTSC or ATSC/QAM/NTSC card in it would be a lot of upside for the cable industry.

CEC does allow routing of signals through various topologies, one source at a time.

Who cares what the content industry wants. The public won the battle with them before on NTSC signals and the same victory for the public is due now.
Perhaps with the new administration.

6.6 GB/hr is ok for first viewing but is overkill for long term storage.
Hopefully, the Hauppauge product ships with conversion software which they have tested to work.
Also, I hope they have tested their pc encoding to ensure it can be read into and written out of, the free and ubiquitous Windows Movie Maker 2 video editor.

The original question should have been "Why should Scientific Atlanta/Cisco or GS/Motorola spend money implementing an interface,such as USB channel/tuner control, without receiving a specific request from a manufacturer of a connecting device ? "
Those who want the STB to implement a new interface must be the prime movers and demonstrate they intend to implement themselves and use this new interface.

Of course you can receive 2 output channels from a STB. Currently, they output only on Channel 3 or 4. A Simple solution would be to use both.
However, the USB interface would allow the STB to be commanded to put any channel on any frequency.

Why do you think the cable industry and STB industry would not want to sell or rent a box for each PC out there in Northern America ?

ATI fell flat on their face and because of that tremendous failure, the PC TV industry has been delayed in its progress by about 4 years, as Microsoft and their band of Korean and Chinese and Long Island Tuner card manufacturers sought to wrest the PC TV convergence from ATI's incompetent grasp and move it forward.

The only reason ATI would drop External Window Closed Captions, if they did, is incompetence. They should have retained it and marketed it, and provided some translators for country portability.

Correct on CEC, though it is optional in the HDMI spec but should not be optional.

Actually, for 2003, I thought ATI's software was a good start, and contained the Closed Caption External Capability. In addition, it had numerous programmable bit rates and resolutions and types of optimization which could be selected into 4 active templates for recording, and an ability within their Library feature to convert the initial saved content into another bit rate/encoding type.
Even today, most of their competition still does not have anywhere near the feature set ATI had at the time.
However, it appeared that that software was developed by someone or a group of people who wholly disappeared from the company and they floundered, attempting to find replacements who could understand and enhance he software they had.
Successive versions were released regularly that improved nothing, and often weakened the performance, threw away existing features and caused crashes.
I remember that newer versions would regularly have the audio simply drop out when mouse actions took place in the TV window.
It was as if they had a contract with someone to release these new versions, regardless of whether they improved the product or not.
When AMD took over that company, they should have rounded up all ATI management and fired them, in a public ceremony.

As I mentioned earlier, the user interface Microsoft puts out for the MCE TV Tuner support is unfocused unwieldy crap. I do not use it myself. And the Avermedia Combo TV product I tried recently seemed to copy that unfocused interface. If that interface continues to dominate the emerging TV Tuner marketplace, it will kill the PC TV convergence cold.

If channel change functionality is already implemented in Set Top Boxes through 1394/Firewire, then it follows that it should be trivial to port that functionality to USB in the near future and ensure that all PCs have this availability.

Who cares about content owners' whims which have such a disastrous effect on the usability of the content.
They transmit their signals through public regulated media and they will have to do what they are told on this matter.
However, it is true that Washington, DC has become more dominated by lobbyist money than 15 years ago. Who knows what will happen.

Sharing of movie content does not appear tobe hurting Hollywood at the box office. Sharing often has the effect of advertising a movie.
Watching a movie along with the rest of humanity either on broadcast/cable TV or in the movie house is never going to lose its allure, and has not.

If OCUR is allowed to record (and playback) 100% video quality, then where is the protection for the content industry ?

STBs output only one signal currently. There is nothing which requires this and there is a huge need to create this ability. Why should the customer with a PIP TV be forced to buy or rent 2 cable boxes (STBs) and set up space for them and their cabling, to satisfy this widespread need ?
It is trivial for the cable box to be designed to output 2 or more channels on separate frequencies.
This area has to change, since the higher resolution content is going to force reassignment of the output frequencies to different frequencies.
As mentioned earlier, the channel change on ATSC is too slow (about 3 seconds) and one solution may be to output a new analog super-NTSC signal with a wider bandwidth from the Set Top Box which has higher resolution content.

Are you saying that Cablelabs has special software/driver requirements in the ATI OCUR OEMs (like Dell etc) PCs to prevent the OCUR-originated signal from being recorded ?

No, but these issues all sound new to you and that does not surprise me because there usually are very few true product Users on forums like this. Most people, especially those outspoken, are industry spokemen and hardly use the product which is the subject of the forum.
Thus, the Rea Issues are often unknown to such forums.

Who uses an antenna nowadays. Last I checked cable has 70% at least penetration nationally, and satellite dominates the other regions.

Most people simply have no concept of being able to remove Closed Captions from the TV Window and being able to consult and scroll back, sometimes an hour back with ATI (eg. after talking on the phone for an hour watching the picture Muted), and have never been able to take the separate saved file of Closed Caption and quote parts of it to Internet friends with whom they discuss the details of a particular show.
No one knows ATI has/had this feature.
It is like all of us discovering this week that down in the basement of Microsoft in 1992 some guys developed something called "Microsoft Word", which never was released/marketed, and we are just hearing about it now and are still using text commands to control our Wordperfect word processing in 2008.
An ATI level of incomptence at Microsoft over the past 16 years could have caused such a weird and wasteful outcome.

That is nonsense. Try watch some TV shows with Closed Captions turned on. If you miss the words you can read the punchline and lyrics of songs are rendered flawlessly. How good are most people at making out the words to even their favorite songs ?

That is, the Descrambler was required to see any channels other than the Must-Carry channels (channels emanating from one's own locality, cable companies were forced to carry, in the clear).
"...Some of us were kept alive, to work, loading bodies. The disposal units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever..."

Sounds like you may have been out of the country when this battle was going on. VCRs could not work, scrambling was a big problem.
People like me were writing letters into various Congressmen.
In fact I remember distinctly at one point I was watching C-Span-2 and Senator Leahy of Vermont took to the Senate floor and discussed this very problem and it seemed to me he was quoting directly from a letter I sent into a Massachusetts congressman on the Telecomm/Commerce subcommittee. Identical examples concerning interference with VCRs etc.
Soon after, the cable freed up and sunshine flowed through the content distribution system again.
Of course, lobbying in DC is a lot more oppressive and campaigns for office a lot more expensive than they used to be.

Right. Apparently, the content companies have succeeded in making an argument that the digital rendition of their content is so perfect that there is a qualititative difference in their loss if that digital signal is allowed to be stored and shared, unlike the 640x480 analog signal, for which the public already won the battle in Congress 15 years ago.
That along with the advent of Napster like Internet sharing abilities.
As I mentioned earlier, there might need to be a compromise intermediate video resolution. But no way is 640x480 acceptable anymore.

People need to contact their Congressman and Senator about this new problem.

They can do with their content what we allow them to when they transmit it through the airwaves and cableways that we the public own or for which we control the easement.

Wrong. Every channel other than Must-Carry was scrambled. Intially, they started out with a few key channels, but then when they amassed enough head-end equipment, they started scrambling everything. Maybe you were out of the country when this was going on.

It depends where elected parties obtain their campaign funds from. Are those $100 internet donations really from average joes, or from some place worse.

Converting down from a higher resolution and bit rate will generate a better 1 Mbps quality picture than recording that directly.
The post-conversion has less time-criticality to deal with.
Besides, as I said earlier, the initial viewing you likely would want in the highest resolution, when you return home from work or play.
These are Real User issues, and when one is on a forum Industry Echo Chamber, many of these sorts of considerations simply are never mentioned -- none of the forum industry people is going home to a TV Tuner television watching experience.

The Set Top Box manufacturers need to implement a USB protocol because they should realize that to solve a variety of TV watching problems with ATSC, there is going to a need to directly control more STB variables than just 'the one channel being watched'.
Single set top boxes have not solved the Picture In Picture problem because of industry incompetence and a lack of representation of Real Users on forums like these.
When I speak to people at some of these companies they tell me they make decisions based on input from forums like these.

Unless you want to admit that you work for an industry company in public relations or whatever else, and serve their interests, it simply is not your role to speak for the industry and defend the incompetence and sloth of the industry.
Real Users should be coming here to demand what they Want.
It is the industry's job to Go Get It, if they want the customers' money.
Sometimes this requires vision on the part of the industry to recognize a need and then market it.
Closed Captions External Window is in this category.

Again, there are serious problems with the ability to switch channels for PIP and the time delay in switching ATSC channels.
The solutions to these problems involve a slightly more complex protocol into the STB than the aged infrared crap that has been around for decades.
And since 95% of PCs are Intel/Microsoft based, USB is the best venue for that protocol.
USB is much more reliable and faster than RS-232 by a factor of at least 4,000.
As the paying user, it is not my job to chase around looking for 1394. I am the guy paying the Cable industry's wages. It is their job to get this done is they want to get paid.
You get the picture ?
Any time you want to admit you work for one of these companies, it's ok...

The STBs do not currently output 2 signals at once, but that is trivial for them to add. They can do this easily, there is demand for it in the marketplace, PIP functionality is widespread, thus it should be implemented. Simple as that. The people watching PIP on their TVs are paying for this whole ball of wax.
And they are even paying the wages of public relations workers for the industry, who pervade the dungeons of public forums like this one.

Again, are you saying that Cablecard input to a cooperating PC like OEM Dell, would allow high resolution content to be stored and played back in original high resolution ? What prevents that stored content from being shared ?

The sales of tuner cards is more pervasive than those numbers. However, the problem is that people who have PC TVs simply do not use them because they simply do not solve basic problems reliably, or are hard to use, and they stop using it and retreat back to their TV.

Currently the user is forced to rent and use the DVR from the cable company to replace much of the functionality we have been discussing.
The reason the DVR exists is because the cable companies have failed to expose the necessary functionality to the PC to allow the PC to perform the scheduling and recording functionality.
The existence of the DVR is clear proof of the need for these STB enhancements.

All of the crap features that are in the STBs right now cost money. Huge amounts of scheduling and recording software in the STB which is unnecessary and functionality which should be performed by the PC in the customer's premises.
Again, ATI was spending money and releasing new versions all through the last 5 years. Same too with the STB manufacturers.
However, it was ill-conceived, and often buggy, crap.
That is the stuff which has been happening, without Real Users represented on forums like this one.

The music industry is dying, but that is because of a lack of quality music. When you look back to all the performers from 30 or 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago, there just is not the quality of music and lyrics to deserve patronage of the public.
Recently I have been listening to a lot of 60's music of various genres.
There just is no comparison. Education, or lack of it today may be a factor in this.
Movies are not as pressured to delivered skilled quality, as a few explosions and the obligatory sex scene with the promoted sex bomb actress of the moment will keep many customers paying.
Understandably, there is a narrowing difference between the movie industry and the porn industry.
Heck, they have a movie out right now about the subject of making a porn movie.
It is the lack of quality writing and acting and singing and musicianship which is damaging these industries.
It would be interesting to take the average musician of today and test them to see if they could write out the notes of their music or even tune their instrument.

The other reason is Payola, which prevents qualified musicians from having their music played on the radio and blocks their hard work from coming to fruition inthe marketplace.
Record companies paying bribes to radio stations all across the country to control what you hear is in restraint of trade, and disables the profit-making incentives of our system from fostering quality music.
The laws exist but are not being enforced. I do not believe anyone has yet gone to prison in the US for paying or receiving Payola bribes to control what music you hear on the radio. And such payments are widespread.