VOOM HITS MIDNIGHT - WEBSITE: "Cease 4/30/05" - Page 155  

There is no requirement to produce ANY HD. The only requirement is to move to DTV. HD is only one possibility. Multicasting up to 6 SD programs in the single channel is another.

Final Voom bill arrived today with a staement on the back transfering all Voom gear ownership to me. They reccomend it be used as an over the air receiver.....thank you Voom!

I must say that was a nice touch.

That is a pretty classy way to go out.

Yup, Voom always was the classy way to go....what a rare commodity in our commercial world today....no often a omapny treats it customers with such respect....usually it always the stupid and the petty....bless you Voom for showing the way!

I heard James won it. Now he thinks this HD stuff is cool. :rolleyes:

Yeah, my letter arrived too.
I was worried they were going to take away my tuner.
I've grown used to using it to watch my local HD channels :-)
Very nice of Voom!

A quick question, does anyone have an HD DVR they use with their Voom tuner?

Once a satelite receiver signal is expanded from compressed state, it can not be recompressed w/o heavy duty DSP hardware so HD DVR is impractical except for satelite compressed signals not available out of any STB I am aware of.

I was not aware about that.
So does the output look awful if you were to use like Voom and a LG 3410A or Sony DHG-HDD500?
Plus I'm talking about local HD channels, since the Voom receiver isn't getting satellite signals anymore.

Well, not familiar with the Sony and what input it takes. If it is analog then you have a level of converstion introducing noise and distortion., not to mention res loss. If it digital and full BW then the Sony better have one hell of a DSP engine inside to compress it.
I suspect there are others here that have more first hand info though.

Maybe I'm missing something, but a Voom box no longer qualifies as a satellite receiver. I don't see how it's any different than any other OTA tuner (except that it's not as user-friendly.) Compression is not a factor, AFAIK.

Digital to analog conversion is a concern on any STB with component outs, but it's certainly not a showstopper and the Voom box does have DVI out in any case.

The real problem is on the DVR side. Due to copy protection restrictions, the LG 3410A does NOT have digital inputs, so you're not going to get true HD but downconverted SD. I don't know of any other HD DVR that's any different.

There are some folks who have experimented with capturing Voom OTA on a PC, and a search of the HDTV Hardware forum should point you in the right direction if you're interested.

If your DVR had DVI it would have to take uncompressed video which is like drinking from a firehose. The hard drive would not be able to keep up and the storage space would go from 10G/hr to some huge number, probably on the order of 50-100G/ hour. So, you need to compress it. Compression of this type requires specialised hardware beyond your likely price point. Look up Ateme.com or mangodsp.com for examples.
Component is the same data rate but now you have to do A/D at astronomical rates before you do compression.
Bottom line is that you can not build a practical PC DVR today, copy protection aside.
Someday, I hope there will be afforable hardware and of course you will need user friendly SW to make it reasonable to work with.
Even if I wanted to buy one of the boards I mentioned, the arduous SW task to make a GUI would make it too much trouble.
I would just be happy to add Hardrive space to my Dish HD DVR!
These boxes save compressed satelite data to the hard drive so they don't need the encoders locally.
Hope this helps...

My ATI HDTV Wonder works fine recording OTA SD & HD onto my hard disk. And the HD remains in HD. My HTPC certainly works fine as a PC DVR, even from external analog sources. But, right, no digital inputs.

Beat me to it, navychop. I have an HDTV Wonder, too. $149 was my price point, and I definitely got my money's worth.

I've also seen, but not experimented with, methods to record uncompressed HD to a PC from the firewire output on a Comcast/Motorola 6412. Not simple from the software standpoint, but where there's a will ...

Thanks, I have an HDTV Wonder as well, but not sure why the tuner is weird.
I tried hooking up the cable from Voom to the HDTV Wonder and it didn't pick up as many channels as Voom.
It picks up channels better if I connect the antenna that it came with.
I'm not crazy about the available compression modes it has either.