ChiDragon
27th February 2013, 22:04
drbuzz0 inspired me to alter his US post for Canada. Portions of text are copied directly from him without permission.
The most common way of recording HDTV signals is by capturing the output of a receiver, such as a satellite or cable box. This is most often done via the analog component video output. The DVI/HDMI signal can also be captured, if it is unencrypted or you add a specific $35 device into your digital signal chain.
Unfortunately, capturing the decoded output has some major disadvantages.
- You are forced to transcode the signal and re-encode it after decoding. You do not keep the signal at the original quality
- The decoder may apply some post-processing to the signal, which can be undesirable or limit your options for re-encoding it. Capturing the raw signal lets you have full control over how it is decoded and any post-processing applied
- You don’t know the bit rate and therefore you can end up using too high or too low a level of compression for your capture. TV stations sometimes throttle down their bit rate, and you may end up capturing it at a higher bit rate than the original one, which is wasteful. You also have no objective way of knowing the quality.
- The same is true of resolution. 1080i/1080p signals are sometimes broadcast at 1440×1080 rather than 1920×1080, but it’s hard to tell. You may be left thinking “gee. This capture seems not quite as sharp as I had hoped. Is it just me or is this ‘hd light’.”
- If capturing from analog output, there is additional quality loss.
Therefore, the best way to capture is to get the real, raw, unencrypted but otherwise undecoded transport stream. Here’s how you can do it:
From Over the Air TV (ATSC):
With a tuner card - There are many ATSC tuner cards available. PCI, PCI-Express, USB, ExpressCard formats are available. This is quite easy. All freely broadcast over the air channels can be recorded with relative ease.
With an ATSC tuner with a firewire output – A few ATSC tuners exist that include a firewire output. The signal can be captured via firewire. They are hard to find, however, and probably are not the best solution.
From Digital Cable Television:
With an QAM-Capable Tuner Card – Many of the OTA tuners out there now support for QAM modulated signals. The difference between HD over digital cable and over the air is that OTA broadcasts use 8VSB modulation, while digital cable uses QAM. Not all HD tuners will receive QAM Signals, but some will.
This will ONLY work with UNENCRYPTED channels. These are the basic cable channels that you do not need to pay anything extra. How many unencrypted channels you have will depend on your system. In Canada, most cable systems offer close to 0 content in ClearQAM. You can determine how much by simply hooking up your coaxial cable to a compatible TV and doing a search. Expect to find the Galaxie music channels grouped with weird numbers, and nothing else.
With a CableCard Tuner – Sadly, CableCard doesn't exist in Canada.
With a cable box with Firewire out – Most newer cable boxes have a firewire port, but if you have an older model, you can ask your cable company to upgrade you to a new one. In the US, the FCC requires that cable companies provide a firewire cable box if you request it. Here in Canada, the CRTC doesn't care about firewire and we only get the ports as a result of the US law and shared hardware. The cable box will, obviously, receive all the channels you are subscribed to.
Unfortunately, like CableCard, there is a catch. Firewire recordings may also be copy protected. If they are, they will be encrypted with a protocol called DTCP (digital transmission copy protection) and you will not be able to view or record them freely with capture software. Instead, they will only be viewable and recordable with approved devices that include DRM support and encrypt the files.
The same rules as with CableCard apply. Some cable companies have not enabled DRM in their systems, but most have. How much of the content is DRM-protected is highly variable. It is really hit or miss.
I have personally tested Shaw Cable in Vancouver, BC and Lethbridge, AB. Most channels are unencrypted. The ones that are encrypted, are random crap like the SD versions of clear HD channels and then the W Movies channel.
On Demand content is always uncopyable, though.
With a Nextcom-modified cable box - This is one of the most expensive solutions, but it is also one of the most flexible. A company called Nextcom Wireless offers modifications to digital cable boxes which adds a USB-2.0 interface for connection to PC’s. With this modification, all digital channels can be recorded without encryption. This will work for all channels you have a valid subscription to and can view.
There are, however, a few requirements. First, this will only work with Motorola-based digital cable systems. There are two main formats for digital cable in the United States. Some use Motorola (formerly General Instruments) equipment and some use Scientific Atlanta equipment. If your cable company uses the Scientific Atlanta system, you are out of luck.
The first thing you have to do is acquire a Motorola brand cable box that DOES NOT have firewire. The newer ones with firewire are not modifiable. You can buy one of these on eBay. You will then have to convince your cable company to authorize the box for a subscription on their system. Most boxes are leased and some cable companies are difficult to get to authorize a customer-owned box. However, you should be able to get them to do so, though it might take some convincing. Alternatively you could try to see if your cable company will lease you an older box without firewire.
Once you have confirmed that you can get the older non-firewire box to work with your cable system, you have to send it to Nextcom to be modified with the additional USB port (they can do it in a reversible manner without drilling holes, if the box is leased), or you can order the modification kit from them and do it yourself.
The cost of the kit is $279.95
The cost to have your unit modded is $599.95
With commercial equipment – This is a long shot and, if possible, will be very expensive. Both Motorola and Scientific Atlanta make commercial digital cable receivers intended for use in circumstances where the signal is being re-encoded or fed into another system, such as at a large hotel, a college campus etc. These boxes output the signal via an ASI or SPI interface.
If you can find one of these, which is difficult, as they are not sold to the general public, expect to pay quite a lot for it. You will next need to get your cable company to authorize it, which is also likely to prove difficult.
You will then need an adapter to capture the raw transport stream signal into your computer. About the cheapest you are likely to find is the DTVWorks SPI interface, which costs $399.99. However, it only works with the SPI interface, which is less common than SPI and has some compromises, such as little buffer memory. For more advanced interfaces and those that support the ASI format, expect to pay over one thousand dollars.
From Bell TV aka Bell ExpressVu (equivalent to Echostar/Dish Network hardware in the US):
With a Bell TV PVR that you own - If you record the content to your PVR without ever transferring it to an external eSATA hard disk, you may copy the data using a special piece of software called PvrExplorerPro. The internal hard drive stores decrypted recordings without any of its own encryption, but when you move content to an external hard drive it is locked so that it can only be viewed on that specific PVR - even if it is copied back to the internal drive.
Again, the internal hard disk drive is unencrypted. But it is not formatted with a normal file system. The recordings are stored on a Linux ext3 partition, with metadata and other files stored separately and debug data stored on separate partitions of the hard disk.
You can easily copy the video .tsp files using Linux, but they are named like es0000.tsp, so not particularly useful. PvrExplorerPro reads the metadata files and renames the files accordingly so that you know what is what.
With a Nextcom Modified Dish Network Receiver - In addition to modifying Motorola digital cable equipment, Nextcom offers a similar modification for Dish Network receivers. The functionality is the same – a USB 2.0 port will allow recording of all channels, HD and SD. Note that the system does NOT work with all Dish Network receivers, so check their site to make sure you get a compatible receiver. As with digital cable boxes, the cost is $279.99 for a self-install kit. Having them do the modification costs between $469.95 and $549.95 depending on the receiver.
With a PC DVB Tuner - Officially, Dish Network service is only available for use with their own brand receivers. However, Dish Network uses the DVB-2 standard for satellite broadcasts and can therefore, in principle, be received by a DVB-S2 tuner, tuners are available in PCI, USB and other formats.
However, Dish Network will not authorize the use of non-brand equipment and therefore, even if you have a subscribed access card, some level of circumvention of their access control is required, even if only to allow the valid card to work with the tuner. Because this topic flies very close to signal theft, it will not be discussed further here, other than to say it has been done.
With a Professional Echostar Receiver with DVB Output - Echostar, the parent company of Dish Network does make a series of commercial receivers that can be subscribed to the Dish Network service. These receivers are intended for headends and other locations which would require a raw output of the transport stream. They tend to be expensive and may be hard to find. As with commercial digital cable receivers, a DVB-ASI or DVB-SPI interface will be required, which is also very expensive.
From Shaw Direct:
See Nextcom information above.
From Free to Air Satellite:
With a PC Receiver – There are a number of stations broadcast by satellite in DVB format and unencrypted. These include international content, shopping channels, public television and other content. A few network feeds can also be found on free satellite. These are easily received with a USB, PCI or PCI Express receiver. There are two types of receivers: DVB-S receivers and newer DVB-S2 receivers. DVB-S2 receivers include support for new modulation types that were not supported by the original DVB-S standard. Increasingly, feeds are moving to the more efficient DVB-S2 standard.
With a standalone receiver - There are a number of DVB/FTA receivers out there that feature network interfaces and a few with firewire. These can be used to capture the transport stream and send it to a computer.
The "Dreambox" is a receiver that uses a Linux-based operating system and is known for being highly configurable and open to home-brew modifications. It is popular with hobbyists.
The most common way of recording HDTV signals is by capturing the output of a receiver, such as a satellite or cable box. This is most often done via the analog component video output. The DVI/HDMI signal can also be captured, if it is unencrypted or you add a specific $35 device into your digital signal chain.
Unfortunately, capturing the decoded output has some major disadvantages.
- You are forced to transcode the signal and re-encode it after decoding. You do not keep the signal at the original quality
- The decoder may apply some post-processing to the signal, which can be undesirable or limit your options for re-encoding it. Capturing the raw signal lets you have full control over how it is decoded and any post-processing applied
- You don’t know the bit rate and therefore you can end up using too high or too low a level of compression for your capture. TV stations sometimes throttle down their bit rate, and you may end up capturing it at a higher bit rate than the original one, which is wasteful. You also have no objective way of knowing the quality.
- The same is true of resolution. 1080i/1080p signals are sometimes broadcast at 1440×1080 rather than 1920×1080, but it’s hard to tell. You may be left thinking “gee. This capture seems not quite as sharp as I had hoped. Is it just me or is this ‘hd light’.”
- If capturing from analog output, there is additional quality loss.
Therefore, the best way to capture is to get the real, raw, unencrypted but otherwise undecoded transport stream. Here’s how you can do it:
From Over the Air TV (ATSC):
With a tuner card - There are many ATSC tuner cards available. PCI, PCI-Express, USB, ExpressCard formats are available. This is quite easy. All freely broadcast over the air channels can be recorded with relative ease.
With an ATSC tuner with a firewire output – A few ATSC tuners exist that include a firewire output. The signal can be captured via firewire. They are hard to find, however, and probably are not the best solution.
From Digital Cable Television:
With an QAM-Capable Tuner Card – Many of the OTA tuners out there now support for QAM modulated signals. The difference between HD over digital cable and over the air is that OTA broadcasts use 8VSB modulation, while digital cable uses QAM. Not all HD tuners will receive QAM Signals, but some will.
This will ONLY work with UNENCRYPTED channels. These are the basic cable channels that you do not need to pay anything extra. How many unencrypted channels you have will depend on your system. In Canada, most cable systems offer close to 0 content in ClearQAM. You can determine how much by simply hooking up your coaxial cable to a compatible TV and doing a search. Expect to find the Galaxie music channels grouped with weird numbers, and nothing else.
With a CableCard Tuner – Sadly, CableCard doesn't exist in Canada.
With a cable box with Firewire out – Most newer cable boxes have a firewire port, but if you have an older model, you can ask your cable company to upgrade you to a new one. In the US, the FCC requires that cable companies provide a firewire cable box if you request it. Here in Canada, the CRTC doesn't care about firewire and we only get the ports as a result of the US law and shared hardware. The cable box will, obviously, receive all the channels you are subscribed to.
Unfortunately, like CableCard, there is a catch. Firewire recordings may also be copy protected. If they are, they will be encrypted with a protocol called DTCP (digital transmission copy protection) and you will not be able to view or record them freely with capture software. Instead, they will only be viewable and recordable with approved devices that include DRM support and encrypt the files.
The same rules as with CableCard apply. Some cable companies have not enabled DRM in their systems, but most have. How much of the content is DRM-protected is highly variable. It is really hit or miss.
I have personally tested Shaw Cable in Vancouver, BC and Lethbridge, AB. Most channels are unencrypted. The ones that are encrypted, are random crap like the SD versions of clear HD channels and then the W Movies channel.
On Demand content is always uncopyable, though.
With a Nextcom-modified cable box - This is one of the most expensive solutions, but it is also one of the most flexible. A company called Nextcom Wireless offers modifications to digital cable boxes which adds a USB-2.0 interface for connection to PC’s. With this modification, all digital channels can be recorded without encryption. This will work for all channels you have a valid subscription to and can view.
There are, however, a few requirements. First, this will only work with Motorola-based digital cable systems. There are two main formats for digital cable in the United States. Some use Motorola (formerly General Instruments) equipment and some use Scientific Atlanta equipment. If your cable company uses the Scientific Atlanta system, you are out of luck.
The first thing you have to do is acquire a Motorola brand cable box that DOES NOT have firewire. The newer ones with firewire are not modifiable. You can buy one of these on eBay. You will then have to convince your cable company to authorize the box for a subscription on their system. Most boxes are leased and some cable companies are difficult to get to authorize a customer-owned box. However, you should be able to get them to do so, though it might take some convincing. Alternatively you could try to see if your cable company will lease you an older box without firewire.
Once you have confirmed that you can get the older non-firewire box to work with your cable system, you have to send it to Nextcom to be modified with the additional USB port (they can do it in a reversible manner without drilling holes, if the box is leased), or you can order the modification kit from them and do it yourself.
The cost of the kit is $279.95
The cost to have your unit modded is $599.95
With commercial equipment – This is a long shot and, if possible, will be very expensive. Both Motorola and Scientific Atlanta make commercial digital cable receivers intended for use in circumstances where the signal is being re-encoded or fed into another system, such as at a large hotel, a college campus etc. These boxes output the signal via an ASI or SPI interface.
If you can find one of these, which is difficult, as they are not sold to the general public, expect to pay quite a lot for it. You will next need to get your cable company to authorize it, which is also likely to prove difficult.
You will then need an adapter to capture the raw transport stream signal into your computer. About the cheapest you are likely to find is the DTVWorks SPI interface, which costs $399.99. However, it only works with the SPI interface, which is less common than SPI and has some compromises, such as little buffer memory. For more advanced interfaces and those that support the ASI format, expect to pay over one thousand dollars.
From Bell TV aka Bell ExpressVu (equivalent to Echostar/Dish Network hardware in the US):
With a Bell TV PVR that you own - If you record the content to your PVR without ever transferring it to an external eSATA hard disk, you may copy the data using a special piece of software called PvrExplorerPro. The internal hard drive stores decrypted recordings without any of its own encryption, but when you move content to an external hard drive it is locked so that it can only be viewed on that specific PVR - even if it is copied back to the internal drive.
Again, the internal hard disk drive is unencrypted. But it is not formatted with a normal file system. The recordings are stored on a Linux ext3 partition, with metadata and other files stored separately and debug data stored on separate partitions of the hard disk.
You can easily copy the video .tsp files using Linux, but they are named like es0000.tsp, so not particularly useful. PvrExplorerPro reads the metadata files and renames the files accordingly so that you know what is what.
With a Nextcom Modified Dish Network Receiver - In addition to modifying Motorola digital cable equipment, Nextcom offers a similar modification for Dish Network receivers. The functionality is the same – a USB 2.0 port will allow recording of all channels, HD and SD. Note that the system does NOT work with all Dish Network receivers, so check their site to make sure you get a compatible receiver. As with digital cable boxes, the cost is $279.99 for a self-install kit. Having them do the modification costs between $469.95 and $549.95 depending on the receiver.
With a PC DVB Tuner - Officially, Dish Network service is only available for use with their own brand receivers. However, Dish Network uses the DVB-2 standard for satellite broadcasts and can therefore, in principle, be received by a DVB-S2 tuner, tuners are available in PCI, USB and other formats.
However, Dish Network will not authorize the use of non-brand equipment and therefore, even if you have a subscribed access card, some level of circumvention of their access control is required, even if only to allow the valid card to work with the tuner. Because this topic flies very close to signal theft, it will not be discussed further here, other than to say it has been done.
With a Professional Echostar Receiver with DVB Output - Echostar, the parent company of Dish Network does make a series of commercial receivers that can be subscribed to the Dish Network service. These receivers are intended for headends and other locations which would require a raw output of the transport stream. They tend to be expensive and may be hard to find. As with commercial digital cable receivers, a DVB-ASI or DVB-SPI interface will be required, which is also very expensive.
From Shaw Direct:
See Nextcom information above.
From Free to Air Satellite:
With a PC Receiver – There are a number of stations broadcast by satellite in DVB format and unencrypted. These include international content, shopping channels, public television and other content. A few network feeds can also be found on free satellite. These are easily received with a USB, PCI or PCI Express receiver. There are two types of receivers: DVB-S receivers and newer DVB-S2 receivers. DVB-S2 receivers include support for new modulation types that were not supported by the original DVB-S standard. Increasingly, feeds are moving to the more efficient DVB-S2 standard.
With a standalone receiver - There are a number of DVB/FTA receivers out there that feature network interfaces and a few with firewire. These can be used to capture the transport stream and send it to a computer.
The "Dreambox" is a receiver that uses a Linux-based operating system and is known for being highly configurable and open to home-brew modifications. It is popular with hobbyists.