The DirecTV HR21 DVR first appeared in September, and one of the key differences from the preceding HR20 was the lack of built-in ATSC tuners. While the HR20 supported satellite and ATSC, the HR21 is satellite only. This has been frustrating to many who would otherwise consider the HR21.

Well, here comes the AM21. The AM21 is a thin box that you can stack, over or under, with the HR21. It simply has two ATSC tuners and connects to the HR21 via USB. It is only $59, and once connected the functionality is just like the HR20 with integrated ATSC tuners. The ATSC channels show up on the EPG, etc.

Via EngadgetHD.

Earl Bonovich, a DBSTalk moderator and a reliable source in the past, has posted front and back scans of the product brochure for DirecTV’s new HDPC-20. This is a dual-tuner satellite receiver which will connect with a Windows Vista Media Center PC USB. The unit is fairly simple, two coax satellite inputs, a USB port for connection with the PC, and a power connection. Interestingly, it also has a second USB port and an Ethernet port, not sure what they’d be used for as it connects to a PC. Oddly the specs, listed right next to the photo of the back, don’t even mention these two ports!

The fine print on the back says: “Requires a Media Center computer running Microsoft® Windows Vista™.” So it doesn’t look like it will work with just any PC, seems like it could have the same limitations as PC CableCARD tuners. On the upside, it also says “Updated January 2008″, so this is current info and not something left from a year ago or something.

Hmm, with the TiVo PC software coming, I wonder if this would be a way to get an HD satellite TiVo.

Via EngadgetHD.

The CES press releases keep rolling, and both Broadcom and ViXS have announced new chips which have direct applications in the DVR market. This is particularly interesting to me as TiVo has been using Broadcom SoCs since the second spin of the Series2, right up through the TiVo HD, and in the TiVo HD they also began using a chip from ViXS. So the capabilities of these new chips could indicate potential features in future TiVo models.

Broadcom’s BCM7335 SoC is aimed at satellite DVRs, of the sort used by DirecTV, DISH Network, and other satellite services worldwide.

The BCM7335 is Broadcom’s next generation satellite set-top box system
on a single chip manufactured in the 65nm process. It integrates a dual
tuner/demodulator from the BCM4506 front-end device and the latest
generation of AVC decoders that supports multiple video formats.

It operates on a dual-threaded MIPS(R) CPU core running at 450 MHz
resulting in over 950 DMIPS in performance. The BCM7335 is designed to
support UMA and non-UMA memory architectures, utilizing a 400-MHz clock, 32
+ 16-bit wide double date rate (DDR2) memory interface for enhanced
performance and allows cost effective memory implementations.

The BCM7335 supports several interfaces for TV output on-chip that is
integrated on-chip including the HDMI, baseband composite, component or
S-Video, and incorporates Broadcom’s advanced 2D graphics engine that
enables true studio-quality text and graphics, efficiently using its memory
and bandwidth.

While this chip is aimed directly at satellite, normally Broadcom will also release other family variants which are targeted at cable and other sources.

ViXS has announced two new chip families, the XCode 3290 SoC and the XCode 3106/3108/3111 companion chips. The TiVo HD currently uses the XCode 2115 companion chip.

    XCode(TM) 3290 Features:
    ----------------------
    - 400 MHz Dedicated Application Processor
        -  Multi-processor architecture
        -  Availability of additional processing power via multi-processor
           architecture
    - Multiple Integrated Peripherals
        -  Dual Ethernet, Dual SATA, and Dual USB ports
    - Multiple Interconnects:
        -  PCI, PCIe, and Host Bus Interface (HBI)
        -  DDR2 and NAND Flash
    - Multi-stream HD/SD Video Transcoding, Decoding and Encoding
        -  MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 Part 2, MPEG2, VC1
        -  Bitrate Reduction, Resolution Reduction and Format Conversion
        -  High-speed Transcoding up to 16x real-time
        -  Support for iPOD, iPOD Touch, iPhone, PSP and other portable
           device formats
    - Fully integrated security
        -  Cable Card, Smart Card and DVB Common Interface (DVB-CI)
        -  Multiple Encryption and Decryption Engines (including 3DES and
           AES)
        -  Multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme support

    XCode(TM) 3111 Features:
    ------------------------
    -   Integrated Peripherals:
        -  USB, UARTs, Transport Stream in/out
    -   Interconnects:
        -  PCI, PCIe, and Host Bus Interface (HBI)
        -  DDR2
    -   HD/SD Video Transcoding, Decoding and Encoding:
        -  MPEG4 AVC, MPEG4 Part 2, MPEG2, VC1/WM9
        -  Bitrate, Resolution and Format Conversion
        -  High-speed Transcoding up to 10x real-time
        -  Support for iPOD, iPhone, PSP and other portable device formats
    -   Software Applications:
        -  Time-shifting (View and Record)
        -  Place-shifting (Remote TV)
        -  WebCam
    -   Fully integrated security:
        -  Cable Card, Smart Card and DVB Common Interface (DVB-CI)
        -  Multiple Encryption and Decryption Engines (including 3DES and
           AES)
        -  Multiple Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes support

And the chips continue to gain power and capabilities, vendors such as TiVo will have an easier time incorporating additional features in their products. Chips like these will make it easier to support additional video formats, play Internet video, transcode video to shift to other devices, incorporate place shifting, etc. It is basically a given that these chips will be in new products, though given product development time lines it may not be until late this year or even 2009, but it will be interesting to see which new products they power, and what those products bring to the market.

Jan 03, 2008 16:43

DIRECTV to Present at the Citigroup 18th Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. –(Business Wire)– Jan. 3, 2008 DIRECTV (NASDAQ:DTV) will present at the Citigroup 18th Annual Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 6:40 p.m. ET/4:40 p.m. MT/3:40 p.m. PT. The presentation will include an update and outlook on the DIRECTV businesses. A live webcast of the presentation will be available at http://www.directv.com/investor and an archive of the presentation and webcast will also be available on this website. -0-

Date:     Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Time:     6:40 p.m. ET/4:40 p.m. MT/3:40 p.m. PT
Speaker:  Chase Carey, President and CEO, DIRECTV
Webcast:  http://www.directv.com/investor

The DIRECTV Group (NASDAQ:DTV) is a world-leading provider of digital television entertainment services. Through its subsidiaries and affiliated companies in the United States, Brazil, Mexico and other countries in Latin America, the DIRECTV Group provides digital television service to more than 16.6 million customers in the United States and over 4.6 million customers in Latin America.

DIRECTV
Media contact:
Robert Mercer, 310-726-4683
Investor Relations: 212-462-5200

This is happening during CES. I’ll listen in if I get the chance, I’m curious if DirecTV and TiVo will be announcing any new partnership at CES this year.

The WeaKnees Blog has posted an overview of the different DVR options to use with DirecTV HD, the HR10-250 (TiVo), HR20 (NDS) and HR21 (NDS) DVRs. It is a pretty good write-up, but there are a couple of mistakes, or places where they’ve conflated issues.

And this unit could also receive OTA HD channels - which are uncompressed, and therefore the highest quality HD broadcasts you can get, if you can get them.

This is not true. OTA HDTV is compressed using MPEG-2. (There are further encoding tricks used to squeeze the HD signal into the available 6MHz band.) And if the channel decides to use their band for multiple channels - remember digital OTA channels can have up to six sub-channels - they may turn up the compression level to squeeze the HD content into less of the bandwidth, to allow for the sub-channels to be carried. So OTA HDTV is compressed, and it is compressed to varying degrees.

Now, the claim that OTA HDTV are the highest quality HD broadcasts you can get, well, that’s debatable. Generally it is probably true. Most of the OTA HD channels, at least during prime time, devote the full available bandwidth to one HD signal and compression isn’t very high. But many cable providers carry the OTA digital signal as-is on their networks. So you may get exactly the same HD signal over cable as OTA. It is easier for the cable provider to just pull in that MPEG-2 stream and stick it on the cable as-is than it is to decode it and then re-encode it. And since broadcast channels are only a handful of their lineup, it is no big deal. So OTA often has no quality advantage over cable, with the very same signal carried by both.

Satellite, on the other hand, has more bandwidth restrictions. DBS providers have been known to use resolutions such as 1440×1080 instead of the full 1920×1080, and to use higher compression levels. So in a side-by-side comparison, the satellite signal is probably not going to look as good as OTA. But is the difference so great as to really be noticed in normal use? That probably depends on the size of the TV and the viewer, but for most users it probably isn’t such a big deal.

They also decided to eventually add new HD channels in a more compressed format called MPEG4 to allow for more channels to be sent simultaneously. Obviously, more compression means a lower quality signal, so the MPEG4 channels are often called “HD Lite” - better than SD, but not quite as good as MPEG2, and even further away from OTA quality.

This just conflates several issues and is flat out incorrect for the most part. Does MPEG-4 provide more compression than MPEG-2? Yes. Does that mean a lower quality signal? Absolutely NOT. MPEG-4 is simply a newer, more efficient compression algorithm. For the same image quality, MPEG-4 will produce a lower bit rate, requiring less bandwidth aka higher compression. And at the same bit rate, MPEG-4 provides a higher quality image. The reason satellite providers, and now cable providers, are switching to MPEG-4 from MPEG-2 is because they can get the same image quality with less bandwidth.

Now, can MPEG-4 channels look worse than an MPEG-2 channel? Of course, but it has nothing to do with the compression algorithm and everything to do with the level of compression. Turn up the compression on MPEG-2 and the image quality drops. Same with MPEG-4. A general rule of thumb is MPEG-4 is twice as good as MPEG-2 - resulting files are half the size for the same quality. But you can always turn up the compression, and say produce an MPEG-4 file 1/4 the size of the MPEG-2 file. Odds are it isn’t going to look as good as the MPEG-2 file, of course. But that’s not MPEG-4 vs. MPEG-2 - that’s higher relative compression vs. lower relative compression.

More people are more familiar with audio compression than video compression, due to iPods, Zunes, etc. Consider MP3 vs AAC. MP3 is short for MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio, and it is a fairly early audio codec. AAC is short for MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, a much newer and more efficient codec. The AAC files sold through iTunes are mostly 128kbps AAC and most users think they sound pretty good. But most users think a 128kbps MP3 is low quality, and to be as good as a 128kbps AAC track the MP3 needs to be 192kbps or even 256kbps. Many people have trouble distinguishing 256kbps AAC from uncompressed audio, while MP3 needs 384kbps-512kbps, or even higher, for the same performance. The MP3 codec is less efficient, and therefore requires more bits to produce the same audio quality as the more efficient AAC encoding. It is just a different way to encode the source signal, which requires fewer bits.

Also consider that MPEG-4, specifically MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) aka H.264, is one of the codecs used on the best sources of HD video available today - Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Both formats support three codecs - MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC, and VC-1 (a standardized version of WMV9, which is of similar performance to MPEG-4 AVC). Most of the titles available on both formats use AVC or VC-1, and they’re considered to be the best HD content available. The quality has more to do with the encoding than the specific codec used. Since the discs have finite storage space, and further limits on transfer rates, etc, in the specs, studios use AVC because it allows them to store more content at a higher quality than MPEG-2, generally speaking.

Saying that because MPEG-4 allows more compression ‘obviously’ means a lower quality signal is just plain wrong. MPEG-4 allows more compression (than MPEG-2) for the same quality signal. Now, the actual quality will vary channel to channel simply due to different levels of compression. DirecTV, and DISH Network, are known to compress less popular channels more than the popular ones, reserving transponder bandwidth for the popular content. And it is entirely possible to have MPEG-4 channels that look better than MPEG-2 channels, when you have MPEG-4 will lower compression levels and MPEG-2 with higher compression levels. For the same bit rate, MPEG-4 will look better. There is nothing ‘HD Lite’ about the new MPEG-4 channels.

I was disappointed to see these statements, since WeaKnees is normally more accurate than that. But the write-up, overall, is OK.

Remember when Microsoft and DirecTV announced that they were developing tuner modules and the associated software that would allow vendors to sell Vista-based Media Center PCs with built-in DirecTV support? No? Well, I can’t blame you, since it was at CES 2006, nearly two years ago now. Since then there have been very few additional mentions of the development. Even at CES 2007, both parties were mum about the project. It seemed that it, like so many other CES announcements, had simply died a quiet death.

Well, CES 2008 is just a couple of weeks away, so we may hear something this time around. But Chris Lanier has some interesting info in his blog. He spotted a job posting which indicates Microsoft is still working on satellite TV support in Vista:

We are delivering next generation TV Tuners designed to deliver Premium TV experiences from world class Satellite TV network operators into the Media Center Edition PC. TV Experiences such as PPV, H.264 HD, in-band guide loading, all on newly developed dual-tuner TV receiver devices makes this job exciting and fast moving.

DirecTV isn’t mentioned by name, and the technologies listed apply equally to DirecTV and DISH Network, as well as other DBS providers outside the US, but it does provide some hope. He also found a second job posting which indicates the satellite TV support will not be confined to the US:

Working with Satellite TV providers, both in U.S. and Europe, you will help deliver native Satellite TV tuners allowing native content to flow directly into Media Center, opening up HDTV and NetOp experiences/services directly into the PC.

So it seems the project, at least satellite TV support in Vista Media Center in general, isn’t dead just yet. It remains to be seen if Microsoft and DirecTV are still actively engaged, or if this is just a platform development by Microsoft that would allow such support in Vista. In any case, it certainly has taken a while since the initial announcement, which made it sound like it would be seen in the then near future.

Picked up from EngadgetHD.