[Discuss-gnuradio] pcHDTV HD-3000 card is shipping; easy HDTV

[John Gilmore]

For people who want to decode HDTV in hardware rather than with GNU
Radio software, this board is now shipping.  It does NOT honor the
broadcast flag, and will therefore be illegal to manufacture after
July, 2005 [if the FCC's power-grab for authority to regulate how
receivers for radio signals are built is upheld by the courts].

GNU Radio is not a practical way to watch HDTV.  It takes a long time
to capture and decode the data stream -- like 40x as long as the show,
last time we timed it.  We built it to show that an open source
implementation CAN work.  We could speed it up in various ways, but
we've had other things to do (like pushing the USRP hardware out).

This card IS a practical way to watch HDTV on Linux.  It's supported
by MythTV and other free video and PVR (personal video recorder) software.

The HD-3000 card is only good for receiving analog TV and HDTV, as far
as I know.  But the drivers are all open source, and hardware is often
designed with "bypass" modes for debugging, which disable entire
blocks of the chip (such as the ATSC decoder) and permit raw signals
to be observed by software.  There may well be a way to configure
it to tune in and digitize other signals of interest.

This 5V PCI card costs $190 in single quantities, with volume
discounts available:

  http://www.pchdtv.com/hd_3000.html

Here's more info about the lawsuit against the FCC's "broadcast flag"
regulation, American Library Association v. FCC.  The FCC not only
claims a power to dictate the design of receivers (which it has never
claimed before), and then uses that power to dictate what kinds of
equipment the reciver is 'permitted' to convey the received signal to.
This 'permission' results in the FCC regulating a wide variety of
devices that can be plugged into a receiver.  The FCC delayed imposing
rules that would outlaw GNU Radio, because they knew they were on
shaky ground there.  Librarians, consumer groups, Public Knowledge,
lobbyists like the Center for Democracy and Technology, and EFF sued:

  http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/?f=broadcastflag.html

Here's more about the Broadcast Flag itself:

  http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/

        John