www.makezine.com/02/hdtv
a non-Mac HDTV viewer/recorder. Sticking with Mac, Step 1: Get Started
you can either fork over the medium-to-big bucks to In order to start watching HDTV on your Mac, you
buy a turnkey solution, like Elgato’s Eye TV 500 ($350 need to have a certain number of items on hand.
USD) ( oreilly.com/go/eyetv), or you can try to put These include the following:
together your own system using a decoder card, an
antenna, some freeware software, and a lot of love, elbow grease, and spit. Naturally, I chose the latter. *A higher-end Mac. You’ll need a dual 1GHz Mac or a single 1.44GHz Mac at a minimum. Even faster
is even better. HDTV takes up a lot of processing
speed. Also make sure you have lots and lots of free
disk space, so you can record your programs as you
watch them. You’ll need to use a tower-type system
with at least one open PCI slot.
HDTV
Broadcasts
Author’s note: This article discusses American NTSC broad- cast of high-definition television. Apologies to readers from *A DVICO Fusion HDTV 3 Gold ATSC card. I picked one up for about $175, shipped from other countries. Copperbox ( copperbox.com). The DVICO website
( oreilly.com/go/dvico) lists several vendors.
When you watch TV on a traditional television
set, you’re watching fairly low-quality video. The Tip: Want to save a couple of bucks at Copperbox? If you
have a spare opossum picture (even road kill), email it to
analog signal contains 525 vertical scan lines with a patrick@copperbox.com to claim your discount. My brother- horizontal resolution of, say, 400 to 500 dots. And in-law once gave me a set of ‘possum coasters, complete with of that whole picture, you can see maybe two-thirds tire tracks. Finally, they (and my handy-dandy flatbed scanner) of it because your good old picture-tube-based came in useful for something! television set does something called “overscanning” to protect the picture tubes against the effects of aging. Enter something called ATSC ( atsc.org). *An antenna. Target. $10, give or take.
ATSC stands for Advanced Television Systems Com- It’s easy to get set up. Just crack open your Mac mittee, an American standards body that defined a case and install the PCI card. Close the case back way to transmit pure digital signals using MPEG-2 up, connect your antenna to the card and you’re set. compression to your television set. (Yes, that’s the You’ll need to install a driver and the proper viewing same MPEG-2 compression used by DVDs.) software, as you’ll see in the next section.
When you watch TV on a traditional analog set, the television (or a converter box) grabs this digital Step 2: Download the Software signal, converts it to analog format, and displays it. You can find most of the software you’ll need at
It may look better than the quality you’re used to, John Dalgliesh’s defyne.org/dvb/ website. John is but it’s nowhere near as good as the quality you’d the author of i Tele, tunetest, and more. (He is also a see on a purely digital set. Analog TVs can’t even kind and patient man, who helpfully answered many begin to do justice to HDTV’s 720 or even 1080 technical questions for me.) Here’s a list of the broadcast lines of resolution, let alone the horizon- software you’ll want to have on hand. tal resolution of 1280 or 1920 dots per line.
The MMInputFamily Device Drivers. In order Finding a Broadcast to view HDTV, you’ll need to install these device To find digital broadcasts in your area, point your drivers so your software can communicate properly browser to Antenna Web ( antennaweb.org). You’ll with your capture card. Download directly at need to enter your zip code to perform the search. oreilly.com/go/MMInput.
To start, click Submit after entering your zip code.
A new page opens, displaying all the over-the-air broadcasts in your vicinity. Click the Show Digital *i Tele, a viewing application that lets you watch your HDTV programs. i Tele automatically scans the
Stations Only radio button. This limits the display to airwaves for active signals, display them for you to
digital broadcasts. watch, and record them to disk. It’s currently at ver-
sion 0.5.7. Download directly at oreilly.com/go/itele.
References:
Archives