How hard would it be to hack a GT TV tuner to digital?

[soop]

I know, there's little point as you can get a better picture on something else for less effort and small $, but I think it would be interesting.

From what I can see, it may not be that hard.  Obviously half of the circuitry would be redundant, the part involved in recieving and decoding the analogue signal, but I'm wondering if the part that takes this data and feeds it to the GT would be able to handle a similar digital signal from another source?

[thesteve]

the TE/GT runs all analog video through the tuner, as in no digital circuitry.
it would require a converter, similar to the external converter boxes, which are power hungry.

[soop]

the TE/GT runs all analog video through the tuner, as in no digital circuitry.
it would require a converter, similar to the external converter boxes, which are power hungry.

Ahah - but the GT tuner does have an AV feed.  So if you could find something (maybe one of those USB DVT dongles?) that could fit in the same shell, you could run a digital signal straight to the AV input (internally) and wire up the power.  God knows how you'd tune it though.

[SignOfZeta]

If you gutted the original TV turner's shell you could built a digital TV tuner in there, I'm sure. The power consumption would be fucking enormous though, even compared to the already horrible battery destruction that is the standard GT.

You can't just use something like a USB TV tuner though since those only do part of the job. They only provide a compressed digital video stream, usually in a format that a high end OS understands as standard. In order to use one you'd have to build an entire PC/Mac into the GT itself. I'd start shopping around to see how integrated tuner chips have become. Maybe they have enough features built into them now to make this possible.