Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Status of BTTV/CX88 capture

[Martin Dvh]

Hi John,
Yes I got your hint already.

John Gilmore wrote:
> > > > I think I am going to look for a nice cx2388x
> > > > capture card.
>
> Look at the PCI card by pchdtv.com.  They use the cx23883, plus a canned TV
> tuner by Thomson.  All the drivers are open source.  It's designed to be
> an open source compatible HDTV and SDTV interface card.
I have just today been looking at it.
Hoped they had the hardware design online but couldn't find it(yet).

I have just contacted the technical guy you pointed out to ask about the 
details of the design and the driver.

They use a chip to do the atsc decoding.
With a little hardware mod it should be possible to attach the IF output of the 
tuner to the analog ADC input of the cx2388x.
(Which is now connected to the atsc decoder chip).

Maybe it is even possible to reprogram the atsc chip to act as just an ADC (and 
passthrough the undecoded data)
That all depends on the chip capabilities and the datasheets available.

I hope it is indeed possible to use these boards for gnuradio because they did 
a good job of creating an open HDTV receiver.
Too bad we can't use them in europe (digital TV here is DVB in stead of atsc 
and 8Mhz channels in stead of 6 Mhz)
If we hack them to be usable for gnuradio it might still be possible (with an 
8Mhz tuner)
> I have five of these cards lying around, so if you write code that
> makes them useful for GNU Radio, I can provide cards to Eric & Matt...
That's cool.

greetings,
Martin