we are about to start a custom ATSC/HDTV receiver development work. It uses
Phlips tuner and NxtWave's VSB demodulator. Our customer will be putting
out the product in the 3rd quarter this year.
I think that this whole thing is an exercise in futility. ATSC signals are
one of the easiest to hack into, since the standards are well known and can
be downloaded from atsc.org. Tuners are available from a number of sources.
The VSB demodulator may not have many suppliers. I do not think that there
is something called "ATSC Tuners". The Philips tuner can output the IF and
CVBS signals from both ATSC and NTSC broadcasts. If one need to decode
NTSC, then the IF/CVBS is fed to a broadcast decoder otherwise to the VSB
demodulator, which outputs TS.
regds...das
At 09:15 PM 3/27/02, you wrote:
A group of industries meeting in Los Angeles is planning to recommend
to Congress that regulations be imposed on all devices capable of
receiving and demodulating ATSC broadcast signals. These regulations
would include "robustness" and "tamper-resistance" rules designed to
prevent end users from getting access to cleartext MPEG versions of
broadcast signals.
This proposal is similar to the more infamous SSSCA (now CBDTPA) but
is much narrower -- it only applies to one particular technology
(ATSC) rather than to all computer and CE systems. The industries
which were concerned with SSSCA are actively promoting this as an
"alternative", "compromise", etc., and using it as an argument against
the CBDTPA!
One result of this proposal appears to be that no ATSC tuners could
have open source drivers, nor could open source software play back
recorded ATSC signals, nor could those signals be recorded in
open-standard formats. Existing tuner cards like HiPix which don't
include copy controls and let you open an ordinary MPEG stream could
be banned outright, in favor of alternatives like AccessDTV which
require proprietary drivers.
We would like to get in touch with lead developers on any projects
which would be affected by this -- especially projects which include
or plan to include ATSC support. Currently, I'm only aware of one
or two tuner/capture cards which would be affected. If this initiative
succeeds, any future cards sold in the U.S. will include "tamper-
resistance" and copy controls.
For more information, please see
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/HDTV/
--
Seth Schoen
Staff Technologist schoen@xxxxxxx
Electronic Frontier Foundation http://www.eff.org/
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 1 415 436 9333 x107
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