"Ol' Duffer" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
says...
There was talk of converter boxes being made available.
Will this be the case and will they be reasonably priced?
Samsung makes some, and probably others, but they are still a bit
pricey, IMO.
They're done to $199 last time I looked at Wal*Mart, and within a couple of
years I imagine they'll be closer to $49, if not less. (Anyone remember the
first DVD players to come out? And how now a cheap DVD player can be had for
$25!? No moving parts in an HDTV converter...)
Or are they perhaps a home brew project that we might be able to build
ourselves?
Most converter boxes are just a couple of large digital ASICs, so it's not
going to be cost effective (at least not for very long) to build your own.
(Just like the DVD players -- it's almost impossible to build one for less
than the cost of buying a new one.)
On the other hand, if you want to experiement with HDTV, the GNURadio project
along with the USRP radio board has software to perform decoding on a PC.
Note that it isn't real-time decoding, though, since it's all being executed
by the CPU.
---Joel Kolstad