[Sussex] BBC2's working lunch next week

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Mon, February 7, 2005 9:49, Mark Harrison (Groups) said:
> The point I was trying to make is that just because something is
> broadcast digitally, doesn't mean that it's "better quality". Sky in

Of course.

> Just because you are directly capturing a digital stream doesn't mean
> that you aren't suffering from compression. It just means that someone
> else has done the compression on an unknown platform, to an unknown set

It also means that someone has done the encoding for you, which has huge
resource usage advantages. For example, very few analogue TV cards have
decent encoder chips on them, so you are left trying to pull raw video
across PCI and trying to encode it with the CPU, which is a pretty
unpleasant experience on the whole, and totally unsuited to doing on
little TV boxes.
Swings and roundabouts, certainly, but I think you'll struggle to get a
better recording of TV into a PC than that from a DVB card :)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net