Hi Darren,
Thanks for the reply. I am aware that your digital equivalent to our Freeview have some differences with ours. But broadly speaking its a number of groups of channels broadcast across a group of frequency bands. A Freeview box tuner then tunes into one of those bands and additional circuitry then decodes the specific channel from the multiplexed data stream on that band. The resident firmware provides an interface for displaying the EPG, OTA updates, etc. I've probably grossly over-simplified and feel free to correct me if my understanding is faulty.
Skolink is correct. For the idea I'm looking at the Freeview EPG and a lot of the other functionality in a typical set-top box firmware is pointless. All I want is something that can tune and decode Freeview channels and feed the result to the host Tivo which as you rightly point out has a far superior interface and EPG. :)
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Some people successfully used a compact digital STB made by Thompson a while ago and either fed the video out of that into the rear video input socket or even got adventurous and removed the existing tuner module and fed the video into this point.
That sounds like the kind of thing I'm looking at. Any info, howto's or photos? This why I'm interested in the pin-outs for original Alps tuner.
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Control was still via IR but I am a little confused as to your proposal because your method would still need an IR signal to switch channels (the boxes you list all still need IR for channel change) or at the very least some kind of translator to convert the TiVo I2C tuner control signals to something your digital tuner can understand.
That might not be insurmountable given the some of the things that have been achieved like sound module on the Mark 1 PAL conversion or the Cachecard.
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You also do realise that what you are propsing still is essentially connecting up an external digital STB but somehow you want to control the channel switching via the TiVo I2C bus signals rather than the IR Blaster?
I think it would be a much neater and less error-prone if it was all built into the Tivo.
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It will still be an analogue video output from the digital decoder that is again digitized into SD only MPEG for recording on the hard disk. It is still only a single tuner and the ability to record one video stream.
Isn't this what currently happens when we feed a Tivo from an external set-top box? If it was built-in there'd shorter paths, fewer connections and a neater setup under the TV :D
So! Can anyone help me out with the specs/pin-outs of the Alps tuner?
Thanks
Paul