What have you been smoking?
The dongles are full digital TV receivers, and do have the full bandwidth needed to do that. Using them as an SDR merely bypasses the decoder, grabbing up to half the available data because that's all the chip can stuff into a USB stream.
With the right software (that they are sold with) you can watch TV without any SDR software.
CH
Misinformation, apparently. Thanks, I stand corrected! I'd only used them in the SDR mode.
Are there any which actually decode all the way to the HDMI video level, or is their output the MPEG digital stream (which would then require either software or GPU or dedicated-MPEG decode to go to the monitor)?
You're probably right about HDMI, but smart TVs accept compressed video streams from a DLNA server, so there's that.
I suspect the dongles decode the transport stream and leave the rest to the driver software. But who knows, it's closed source, shrug!
The common dongles are just a direct conversion receiver and an AD converter. The rest of the processing must be done by the host.
On a sunny day (Thu, 10 Feb 2022 06:20:47 -0800 (PST)) it happened Wim Ton snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
That is not correct, There are 2 chips in the dongles, the second one, the RTL2832U, does full decoding to transport stream format, but can be configured to output sequential IQ data.
So all you need in software then is parse the transport stream (simple) and a MPEG2 or whatever format decoder. Most PCs have that already implemented in hardware, even Raspberry does that (I remember buying a decoder key for a few $ for the older model to activate the hardware MPEG2 decoder). In fact the Raspberry chipset is original a TV chipset.
Not sure what my new RP4 has enabled as decoder, interesting thread here:
Many if not most rtl-sdr projects however configure the stick to only use the sequential IQ quadrature output, such as my spectrum analyzer:
I have never tried to receive digital TV with my sticks, I have Chinese made boxes that do that fine. We moved to DVB-T2 recently here, and I had to buy a new Chinese TV box for that.
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