Feature Comparison

At this point, I was tired of requirements development and was hungry to look at some hardware. And already the tuner card had expanded 7 times from my original requirements list and was no longer in the “simple elegance” category. Besides, the requirements I'd already chosen would probably turn out to be incompatible anyway due to some Linux/DRM clash. More about that later, too. So after applying my list of functions to the vast list of TV tuner cards, I was left with a pretty short list of five viable options:

Ok, fine. It’s really three viable options, but who’s counting?

ATI and LeadTech appear to be continuing down the path of only supporting Windows and is in close collusion with the misnamed “Trusted Computing” movement, so probably neither will support Linux anytime soon.

Fugue: The Operating System

At this point I needed to make a premature decision about operating systems because of my scant choices in the matter. So I made a decision matrix.

Simple

and elegant again, I made my choice: for better or worse, I chose Linux to move forward with. I did, however, take care to hedge my bets by reserving enough disk space for a Windows partition, in the event that I needed to kill Windows-only zombies.

So much for my MythTV box!

I'm left with only one real choice: the HD-5500. Unfortunately, sparse choice is pretty typical for Linux support, so it's not too surprising.

Plan B

To build a Windows Media PC, there are really only two choices available given the stand-alone constraint. So as a backup plan against some very evil people trying to lock me out of my own personally owned computer, I picked a Windows PC version of the hardware as well. As it happens, I also know that there's an alternate issue with Linux, related to its fundamentally open nature: digital rights management (DRM).

There are actually two issues: cable/satellite systems and Blu-ray/HD DVD. High definition video is considered to be high-value content by all major content providers. As a result, they insist that the content be protected along the entire transmission path, which, unfortunately, includes the CPU.

Briefly, Blu-ray DVDs are encrypted and as such, the players, whether they are hardware or software must include what are known as Device Keys in order to decrypt them. There are very strict rules that manufacturers must adhere to in order to get a device key from the AACS, the organization that holds the patents on the protection scheme used by Blu-ray and HD DVD devices.

Because player software for Blu-ray requires a device key to decrypt a video stream for playback, open-source software is not an option. If it were included, people would simply be able to read it and decrypt all their HD content for such evil purposes as saving their movies to a central server.

If people were able to do that, then their kids wouldn’t have the ability to scratch them into unusable plastic disks, thus the content providers would lose out on the replacement market. Besides, someone might upload the content to the internet, although I’m sure that’s only a secondary consideration because that’s illegal.

In any case, the drivers for Blu-ray or HD DVD players are tightly controlled to prevent people from such unauthorized use as making backups and are only available in Windows. The DRM doesn’t much apply to over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts (yet) so it largely doesn’t affect TV tuner cards.

However, a side effect of this is that many manufacturers completely neglect Linux in their driver development efforts, thus limiting the choices Windows XP Media Center and Windows Vista.

I placed the ATI HDTV Wonder on the list as a backup in the event that I found it necessary to buy HD DVD based content in the future.

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