Some more HDTV Info
Well, I have figured out a little more than I had yesterday about HDTV in general, and the Comcast Motorola DCT-6200 Cable box in particular.
My problem with cutoff picture (where I mentioned that the “Fox” watermark was cut off) is due to the fact that widescreen HDTV content does not display on my standard format 4×3 format television like I expected it to.
When I displayed HD content it look overly tall, pretty much like I expected it to. However, when I put my TV into widescreen mode, I expected that the entire picture would be reduced and displayed on my screen. Not so.
The TV adds black bars to the top and bottom to correct the shape of the picture, but does not change the right and left borders at all, leaving some of the picture cut off. Poo. Not particularly noticeable unless there is a watermark along one side.Those firewire ports on the back of the unit that I mentioned in my last HD post? They work. Well. I captured full resolution 1080i content this evening (complete with 5.1 AC3 audio) straight to my Mac hard drive. I used the Firewire SDK utilities from the Apple Developer site to accomplish this feat, and VLC to play it back. Given that Steve Jobs announced yesterday that iMovie 5 (to be shipped on Friday) will support recording and playback of HD content, I’m not going to bother to explain how I did it. The technique can be found about 30 different places via a Google search, and may be completely obsoleted in about 48 hours. <grin> I’ll always know I managed to do it the hard way
Unfortunately, I don’t have quite enough processor to play back 1080i content smoothly, but I’ll have to try again with some 720p stuff.
Yes, using a.Mac account (which allows you to sync multiple Macs remotely) and a few choice Applescripts tied into iCal, you could make just about any Firewire 400-capable Mac (including the new Mac Mini) into a pretty darn functional HD-PVR. Again, I’ll wait on this project until I see what iMovie is capable of.