Getting TV on a PC is easy, everyone knows that. The first time we saw TV on a PC was when our IT manager bought a $50 tuner card, stuck in on a desktop, sent the output to a projector and put an 8 foot show on at work, in the lunchtimes when the soccer world cup was on.
So when people come out with wonder chips that claim to put every type of HDTV onto a Universal Broadband Receiver including support for DVBT, ATSC, Cable QAM, NTSC and PAL, along with FM radio and GPS capabilities, we all simply take it as read, that this is exactly what has happened, because it seems highly probable.
This week that claim comes from Californian company CrestaTech which is sending out a reference design and chip samples it says of its new wonderchip. The idea is that the GPS chip locates you and configures your PC to download an EPG of local channels wherever you are regardless of format.
Then PC manufacturers can pop in one universal chip and support all analog TV and digital TV standards worldwide. It also claims that it is the first company ever to do this.
Well it depends upon what it has done exactly. What we think Cresta has done with its CTC-200/201 programmable RF and Interface chip is it has worked out how to receive radio signals from 45Mhz right up to 1GHz. We think the demodulation of those signals then happens in software under the power of the PC’s cpu. It even refers in its announcement to a suite of companion software applications, CrestaWare, which provide fast channel scanning, enhanced reception and TV and radio tower geo-location.
If we go back to 2006 at IBC, a little known UK company called Mirics was doing just this, and had a multi band tuner for mobile and other TV reception. That device cost just $3.50 and could receive DVB-H, T-DMB, ISDB-T, DAB-IP, MediaFlo and DAB with all the demodulations in software ‘ the same kind of idea but mostly with mobile TV services. It could pick up radio from 100KHz to 1.9GHz using very little power, for battery enabled devices. It has just had a recent design win (in August) for a chip with ISDB-T onboard for a Brazilian PC.
Much the same can be said of radio and actual demodulators combined, with Siano putting T-DMB, DVB-T, DVB-H and CMMB on a single chip, with low enough power to go into a handset. So perhaps claiming that it is first is a bit of a stretch of the imagination.
However these is some merit in linking GPS so you PC can automatically reconfigure. George Haber, CrestaTech president and CEO said “By supporting any TV broadcast standard anywhere, we’re helping turn laptop PCs into truly mobile media centers, where consumers can experience the ubiquity of the Internet with broadcast television at the same time.” CrestaTech is also selling the chips for inclusion in PC dongles.
One problem is that the PC processor will be handling the demodulation of the signal, including any Forward Error Correction calculations, as well as the decoding of the codec, with only the RF reception being offloaded, so it may keel over if the workload is HD and heavy.