HDTV

High-Definition Television. Means Broadcasts with higher resolutions than PAL or NTSC. For standards and backgrounds, see the Wikipedia article [1].

A note on "HDTV ready" computer-hardware

Nowadays, many DVB-cards (whether USB or PCI, whether DVB-T or DVB-C) are advertised with "HD-ready" or "HDTV" (for example, the newest Twinhan DVB-T card. But then, what does this really mean? An MPEG2 TS in principle can always have high-definition contents, the TS container doesn't bother. But the sticker might mean that the card won't freak out if a TS/PS is not MPEG2, but MPEG4 (as this encoder is often used for HDTV). It might also mean, the card can handle high bandwidth TS (e.g. about 15 Mbit/s for HD-BBC in the DVB-T testrun in London, as opposed to 4 Mbit/s for the regular SDTV). But this is all not well defined, and therefore, this "HDTV ready" sticker might be more of a PR-thing...

However, in no case does it mean, the hardware has a hardware-decoder for HDTV-resolutions (full-featured cards). Such PCI-cards don't exist yet (end of 2006). (This makes it difficult to use them with the software VDR, as that one mostly relies on hardware-decoding.) The decoding therefore has to be done by the CPU, and HDTV requires fast hardware (>2GHz processors).

This note is complicated by the fact that many broadcaster will not send HDTV free to air, but either encrypt it (making additional hardware necessary: CI, CAM, which is not always possible to find for / connect to a given DVB-card) or turn a No-Copy-Flag on, which (at least currently) means it can't be handled by Linux. See also DVB-S2.