Saturday 10 July 2010

HD-PVR assimilation

I managed to find a corrigendum with the stream table
in it so I was able to complete that part of the code.

I spent most of the morning trying to figure out why
v4l2 returned error codes when I tried to control the
Hauppauge HD-PVR. Eventually I figured out you need
to use the extended controls to control the device.

Currently the program can ingest a transport stream
from the HD-PVR alter the various elementary streams
to the required value and then transmit the whole thing
using DVB-T. It also amends the SI tables accordingly.

The TV receiver recognises the AAC audio but because
it does not have an H.264 decoder, it displays service
unavailable for the video.

Hopefully a used HD set top box will be arriving @G4GUO
next week which has a H.264 decoder in it. I need a new box
for the domestic TV anyway. Apparently we don't have
HD in our area yet.

The HD-PVR is based on an H.264 encoder chip developed by
Ambarella. Unfortunately it only supports 720p and 1080i.
The company does do a chip that supports 1080p. I expect that
eventually it will be possible to buy cheap hardware based on that.
For the moment I won't be able to claim Full HD!

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