[Sterling]

I was wondering if anyone had a method for doing this:


Grab OTA HDTV with one of the popular HDTV cards.

Then recode the channel to something much smaller, but still looks good and send it out over a streaming media server.


I was thinking maybe taking Windows Server 2003 with Media Services and encoding the HDTV stream somehow into their new format for broadcasting to my other systems.


My real scenario is to place the HDTV receiver computer on the top of my mountain and wirelessly beam it 4 miles to my house for this purpose.


Maybe I'm dreaming and the bit rate will never get that low and/or it will be impossible to recode live HDTV per channel into something that small. Or the resulting resolution will look like crap.


And to have that all automated. That's my dream.


I would also settle for grabbing the channel manually and recompressing it over time on the server before sending the resulting chunk as a file to my system at home for later viewing.

 

[Versa]

no, its not possible, can't do either of the two things you want.


media services does a decent job with regular tv resolution, but it takes a crap load of cpu power to do it, to even think about trying it on an hdtv resolution is to laugh in the face of intel. Maybe when we get up to 20 gigahertz processors.


As far as encoding it in chunks, well you COULD do that, if you sat there and did it, but doing it automatically ... very very doubtful.


I re-encode HDTV to Xvid and for a typical HDTV 2 hour movie it takes anywhere from 24-48 hours per pass on my athlon 2.4+, although that is with all the whiz bang options turned on, you could make it faster encoding, but the file size would bloom and the image quality would drop.

 

[Sterling]

Yeah, I guess you're right.


What is the bit rate of HDTV anyway per channel?


I know the OTA PCI tuners store about 8.5GB per channel per hour. But is that just one subchannel or is it all subchannels and all audio from one channel?


What we need is a decoder DSP chip that takes the OTA HDTV and converts it to WMV9 on the fly so we get a better compression than HDTV but retain a lot of the quality (better than DVD).

 

[Yablo]

Quote:

Originally posted by Sterling What is the bit rate of HDTV anyway per channel?

It is 19.3Mbps, this includes all of the subchannels and audio.

 

[Versa]

One thing you could do though, is to setup a computer to capture HDTV to the hard drive at the site, and then use wireless networking to connect the two computers with 802.11A or 802.11G , that speed network SHOULD be able to just about play a 19.2megabit/sec HDTV file over the wireless network with no dropouts. It wouldn't be real time, it would be at least one minute delay, configurable to what ever you want, but you could fast fwd thru commericals then also.


For the four miles you would would need some good point to point antennas, one of those pringle can antennas at either end should probably do, as long as you have line of sight.