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You shouldn't let your justified hatred of television programming stop you from ever using a TV, they can be good displays... I've got a 27" Samsung HD-ready that I got as a surplus/second online for $300, and it makes a nice display for my laptop and a nice console monitor. You could also just get a TV-in card; I used one until I was out of college and got the TV. I recommend Leadtek's card for tuner and picture quality, and it works with DScaler. And GameTunnel is awesome, they're a great indy review site.

Have you tried dscaler and a basic tv tuner card? I don't have a projector, but it does a pretty darn good job of making NTSC look decent at 1600x1200 from close range on my 19" CRT. If anything you could run the projector at its native resolution and the video scaler in a PC's video card might do a better job than the projector's.

Dscaler project is developing free MPEG-decoders (mpeg1 & mpeg2), get the latest alpha here: http://www.dscaler.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=4343& sid=38619993305aa424b62fd8065cc2c093

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of open source developers who have never touched GNU Make.

you might try these guys.

www.virtualdub.org
www.dscaler.org

And many more.

Open source on windows, OMG it does exist!!!!

Step out of your Linux bubble.

it's not a review, it's a plug-fest.

"With the exception of the composite connection, we'll be sticking with Monster Cable wires for testing. You pay a little more, but based on experience, we find these cables are of the best quality. Only reason we're not using Monster Cable composite cables is due to budget reasons. However, this will give us a chance to test the Theater 200's filtering."

the review itself also doesn't raise any real points about the product..., like what's the image quality compared to some real tv tuner card(that's fucking 7+ years old) when used with dscaler( http://www.dscaler.org/ ) and can it be used with pvr's, is there any kind of linux support whatsoever..

and that you won't be enjoying video on the go due to the external power requirements.

For anyone with a TV card, I recommend trying DScaler - it's open-source software which can filter and display video inputs, particularly from TV cards. I've been using it for the past four years, and it's far better than the TV viewing applications that came with my Hauppage WinTV card, or my friends Pinnacle PCTV card.

I learned 6502 assembly in the 1980's on a Commodore 64. I even have it all imported into my system, into a few D64's full of software I wrote myself - to run in an emulator for old time's sake. (Gee, hard to believe that some of the programs are almost 20 years old now.)

I had a lot of the habits that you describe, and I now program simply in C++ for either Linux or XP.

However, I had run into some performance issues with certain critical loops that were executed millions of times, such as a loop that iterates through pixels in image processing, and I wanted to view the disassembly of it. I understood enough assembly to be able to optimize a tight loop in a plain C code routine, and verified that the assembly was just as good as handcoded non-MMX assembly. (Some compilers do an amazing job now) The only way to improve the performance further in my case, would have to have written MMX/SSE/SSE2 for this 0.05% of a computer program, but even so, I deemed it not to be still worth the effort.

Now, if you are talking about realtime video filters, such as deinterlacing and sharpening (think Adobe Photoshop style plugins executed 50 or 60 times per second for every interlaced video field at 60 Hz for NTSC, 50 Hz for PAL), you still need matrix math operations such as MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembly language if you want to do lots of video enhancement realtime on a live video source.

One example program is the open-source dScaler project - dScaler Realtime Video Processor . You can do REALTIME sharpening filters, denoising filters, motion-compensated deinterlace filters, 3D-like chroma filters, diagonal-jaggie removal filters, etc, all the above simultaneously, on a LIVE real-time video source from a cheap $30 PCI TV tuner card, on today's high end Pentium 4 and Athlon systems. All this would not be possible without assembly language. Now, they are talking about adding realtime HDTV enhancement (1080 interlaced -> 1080 progressive). Run your cable/satellite/DVD box connected to your home theater PC running dScaler, and hook the home theater PC to your HDTV, and the live homemade "upconversions-on-the-fly" you are seeing are shockingly better looking than the bad quality upconvered video you watch on TV; (Important: Don't use S-Video output, connect the VGA output directly to the TV using a component-output adaptor. It's 6 times sharper than S-Video. For more information, see AVSFORUM's Home Theater Computers Forum section for more information about getting HDTV-quality video out of your computer to your HDTV television, especially if the HDTV television does not have a native VGA input.)

(For watching live realtime videoprocessed video, I don't recommend a $30 TV tuner card, the power users like to get more expensive cards such as approx-$250 PDI Deluxe card, which is a Conextant 23882-compatible card that actually has a Y-Pr-Pb component input for computers! Supposedly better analog signal-to-noise ratio, better A/D converter electronics, better power filtering.)

The point is that you don't need assembly language most of the time, but there definitely sure are times that it's exeedingly, absolutely critical.

Found it

The newer replacement for the old Brooktree chips is the Conexant CX2388x series, used in cards like some of the Hauppage cards, the Asus TV Tuner and MSI TV@nywhere. These chips have a number of improvements - for example, better support for high-res capture (up to 754x480), and it also has a real comb filter in it (BT8x8 has just a crappy notch filter like a 15-year-old TV, apparently) which makes a difference in image quality from RF or composite sources. DScaler includes support for these chips now, and there is a Linux driver available, though it seems to be a very early version.

My cheap as hell webcam works fine for streaming video. The quality is decent. And there is still nothing stopping me from going out and buying an awsome digital camcorder or firewire webcam and using that.

But to force it on someone is just bad business.

And what is all this crap about "mucking around" with the OS???

Both of my webcams are USB, they provide 30 fps of 320x240 video. (they can do 640x480 but most connections have a hard time uploading that) I got them, plugged them in, Windows made a little beeping sound and said, "your new hardware has been installed".

I was then able to access all of my video sources, that is 2 webcams, a tv tuner card, and a screen capture program (camtasia) from windows netmeeting, logitech's software (one of the webcams isn't a logitech but is selectable), the deinterlacer/scaler program dscaler, and virtualdub.

OMFG!!! Look!!! All my video sources were accesible from a MS product, a third party product, AND EVEN 2 SOURCEFORGE, OPENSOURCE PROJECTS!!!! Who would-a-thunk it???

I suspect line-doubled 1080i will look better than 720p, though of course that'll vary depending on the source material -- it'll probably be true for anything transferred from film, though, since you'd be able to apply the same 3:2 pulldown algorithm to 60Hz 1080i that you do to 60Hz 480i NTSC to extract progressive-scan film frames.

"I have a 2/3 pulldown DVD player which gives me better quality than any PC ever will"

Probably not, especially when used in combination with a projector.

When your target audience has a TV card in their computer, be sure to include dscaler

It is a neat program that takes away those ugly interlace lines you can see while watching moving pictures. Only drawback is that it is Windows only and needs a 400MHz+ x86

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this one yet. DScaler is a fine GPL'ed BT8x8 tuner and video deinterlacer for Win32. It certainly beats the pants off of the ATI crap that came with my card, and looks and performs better than xawtv for me. All in all, a 10/10 in my book.

Also, one might wish to check out the AVSforum HTPC section for more information on HTPC. The 8000DV does come reccomended, and one could even use the technology to back scale (with DScaler, open source, free, and better than $40,000 equipment) HDTV sources to NTSC, though I'd wonder why you'd do such a thing.

For me, one major thing holding me back from using Linux as my home theater PC is the lack of a Linux port of dScaler. My own programming experience isn't enough for me to wade through the Linux video APIs to get the job done. Not to mention the fact that Linux APIs for video change every year or so (frame buffering, Xvideo, v4l, v4l2, etc).

If you use something like dscaler to watch TV and combine that with a window resizing program that can stretch windows off-screen like YxY, then it would be trivial to stretch the image back to the right proportion and then put the "ad-bar" off the bottom of the screen. If you don't watch TV on your computer you are probably SOL, but lots of people have got them hooked up to their projection systems and HDTV sets. This is an MS-Windows based solution though....

dscaler
YxY

(you might not even need YxY with the more recent versions of dscaler).

It would be nice to have access to quality hardware though. I'm currently interested in an A/V computer, but it is difficult to find quality I/O cards. A GeForce with Powerstrip is a great HDTV output device, but there are few options other than SDI for inputting high-quality video, and it would be nice to have CVBS, Y/C, SDTV component, S/PDIF etc all in one place for easy hacking.

What we really need is someone to put together a cheap input solution around a TI or Analog Devices video decoder (pref. with component in) and a Conexant chip. This would provide an input solution up there with the quality of the Rock, with no need to write additional software drivers.

BTW, anyone know of a Conexant-chipset card that has Y/C input and is not plagued by Macrovision problems? I'd like to use Dscaler but I want DVD and VHS input, without buying a Sima SCC or a hackable DVD player.

Seems to work pretty well for the most part, though once in a while stuff gets checked into the main branch that in my opinion ought to have been sent around to the developers' mailing list for more sanity-checking first.

Anyway, yes, open collaboration does exist out there and is producing good results. DScaler is often favorably reviewed versus $10K+ commercial alternatives.