[dschmelzer]

Hi All--


Has anybody prepared a summary of the open source code available from the different ATSC efforts that have sprung up around the HiPix? If not, below could you please list the ones that you know of and their URLs?


Thanks!


Dan

 

[dschmelzer]

OK, I'll start it off...


Jeff Noxon's HiPix tscheck (Windows & Linux); GNU GPL


Ben Cooley's HDTVtoMPEG2 (Windows); unrestricted license if credit given

 

[junooni]

ATSC trim by balazer

http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/%7Ebalazer/atsc/

 

[dschmelzer]

junooni: Thanks for the link and saving the thread from oblivion.


Unfortunately, balazer's applications are not open source. That's his choice, of course, and I don't want somebody to take his code under the impression that it is open source. Rather, it is licensed "free for personal use".

 

[junooni]

oops. sorry about that. i never looked at the license.

anyway it would be a good idea to have a list of all these utils, and this being the one for all the open source GPL ones. Thanks for starting this. Hopefully there are other great ones that we just don't know about

 

[trbarry]

For DVD2AVI & MPEG2DEC users frameserving to Avisynth, the save-oe project at SourceForge includes PCDVDGUY's changes to be able read and decode/demux ATSC streams.


See www.sourceforge.org or www.trbarry.com/DVD2AVIT3.zip and www.trbarry.com/MPEG2DEC2.zip


But you will probably have to drag through the guides on www.doom9.net to figure out how to use it if you aren't a regular user of these programs.


- Tom

 

[trbarry]

I guess I mostly should mention that from a technical viewpoint and, ignoring moral & legal issues here for the moment (please!), processing HDTV streams is really the same as any other MPEG2 streams like you might find on DVD.


So most of the various free and open source software for (gasp) DVD ripping and processing also applies, once you have demuxed the stream. So practically anything in, say, the Doom9 guides may be useful.


So you can basically add another few dozen or a hundred programs to the list from there. Just start with Xmuxer, HDTV2MPEG2, or DVD2AVI2 and then use the more common utilities.


- Tom

 

[dschmelzer]

Hi Tom--


I have passed along your Save-OE link and Ben's link to an interested party on the Linux side of things. I'm hoping that they will upgrade the Linux core, since it seems like ATSC is the bastard son for Linux...

 

[trbarry]

Hi Dan -


I suspect that to make an HDTV card requires IP licenses that, like DVD, have non-disclosure clauses that pretty much stop the idea of releasing too much driver info.


This of course tends to mean non-Linux-friendly.


- Tom

 

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

But, as we have seen with companies like Apex - if you are in a non-western country you may feel that these NDA's aren't quite as a binding as they are to an American and may decide to violate them in the name of market acceptence or just plain old orneriness. I've got a secret hope that the Koreans (?) behind the myhd card will, in one way or another, spill the beans.

 

[e vey]

>Koreans (?) behind the myhd card will, in one way or another, spill the beans.

 

[dschmelzer]

"I suspect that to make an HDTV card requires IP licenses that, like DVD, have non-disclosure clauses that pretty much stop the idea of releasing too much driver info."


I still keep out hope for the WinTV-D or a DStream card (similar to the PCTV Sat). We have a standing offer from Hauppauge for information about the WinTV-D. It's just a matter of volunteers to make it happen.


Or did I miss your point?


Has Ben thought about releasing his HDTVtoMPEG2 as a DirectShow filter? I am actually getting real-time framerate from a couple of converted 1080i streams using an old version of Ravisent on my P4/[email protected] & GeForce2 GTS...

 

[trbarry]

Dan -


I thought you previously stated there was some legal limitation on trying to support the Wintv-d, something about proprietary microcode that had to be loaded.


I had given up on the Wintv-d for hardware assisted HDTV display but given the right doc it would be possible to turn it into a pretty good recorder. But back when I still had mine installed Hauppauge was not giving out any of that info. It is nice to hear they may be now, but I guess I'm still skeptical.


As far as a demux dshow filter, I though you could use either the Xmuxer one or even one from Microsoft has been mentioned here somewhere. But I don't know if either will connect with Ravisent.


It is interesting to hear about the Ravisent/Geforce results though. I didn't think it was possible to coax as much mpeg2 hardware assist out of a Geforce.


Is it only old releases that will do this? Others have said similar things about older ATI Radeon drivers, that the new ones no longer seem to support this as well.


- Tom

 

[dschmelzer]

Some days everything is tough to do. Other days everything is easy.


About a year and a half ago I was under the impression that you would need the microcode to use the board. But this isn't so. You only need to load it once using the Xilinx application and you're good to go.


OK, so if you only have a Linux box, how does this help you? At the time it all seemed terribly mysterious to me, but today I think that you might be further ahead reprogramming the chip using your own open firmware, if it becomes a problem with distribution.


Somebody who knew what he was doing could probably even improve on or simplify Hauppauge's design. It is all reprogrammable anyway, so there's nothing to lose by, for instance, trying to run the transport stream directly from the demodulator to the sound channel, as a full-fledged DStream card would do.

"But I don't know if either will connect with Ravisent."


Neither do I. But Ravisent will connect just fine to the MPEG splitter, so I guess it's a case of emulating that. Some channels seemed to work better than others. CBS @ 1080i worked flawlessly (Wintop showed between 3-15% free CPU). Others less so.

"Is it only old releases that will do this? Others have said similar things about older ATI Radeon drivers, that the new ones no longer seem to support this as well."


I don't know. This is a filter that I picked up when beta testing the TT player. I didn't go down the software decoding path, but still had the filter lying around on my system.