Slashdot Mirror
PCI Card Lets You Watch HDTV (And Save To Disk)
computer_chacham writes: "Telemann has
introduced the first available PCI card for $400 that shows full HDTV
resolution on your computer. It also is able to directly take the MPEG-2 HDTV
signal, and store it directly on your hard drive. (About 7.7 Gigs/hour, but
still ...) It is also able to output to a TV.
They have a press release,
and a product page.
And e-town has a description
too." Ready-or-not, if you watch the boob tube, you'll soon be watching HDTV -- compared to buying a new TV set, a card like this seems like a smart idea, especially at the cost of storage today and tomorrow. What are the odds it'll ship with support for any Free OSes?
Then the MPAA will file a lawsuit about it. It will then get mirrored until they issue SPAM subpoenas.
Then Jack Valenti will make a copy of a movie off cable to shwo piracy is going on.
I'm having Deja Vue all over again.
Fight Spammers!
Yes it uses mpeg2. No, you can't use this to watch it. Cable uses a modulation encoding.
tcboo
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1) The telemann page does not explicitly say component video out to HDTV and digital audio out. It certainly doesn't look like it from the picture. However, etown claims it can (wait and see).
2) Having used the Hauppauge WinTV-D for a year now on my HDTV, I can say the picture and sound is marvelous already compared to NTSC broadcasts (here in Dallas there are now 5 DTV broadcast channels) The software too is very useful and works well with my remotes. By comparison, the ntsc decode and display thru the card is very second-rate compared to the TV.
3) MAJOR need for improved signal reception and noise rejection (especially of multi-path distortion). It's an incredible pain tuning it to each channel even with an amplified directional antenna.
This is very exciting news since I had given up hope on Hauppauge's WinTV-HD (full resulotion) card, which was never released because of proprietary objections. However, I frankly do not believe that Telemann's full stream recording will ever be made public.
No one else has mentioned it, but the ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder was also supposed to have these capabilities. Obviously, these HDTV features were stripped in order to ship a card for less than $300.
tcboo
Not yet. DivX ;-) is an extremely processer intensive codec to encode. Until you have an MPEG 4 encoder card (which exist, but are not widespread yet) or a very fast processer, your computer won't be able to encode the stream fast enough. In a couple of years computers should be fast enough to encode DivX ;-) in realtime, if we're still using it then.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm not that same person... but I have the same size screen. The screens which people were having troubles with were mostly 32" and larger.
I did such a search and noted the problems and still bought my Wega set anyways. Personally I believe that the complaints were overblown at best.
For the minor problems I've found on my set, I hacked into service mode of the TV and corrected them (a hacker's favorite TV? - there are hundreds of adjustment parameters). No TV comes from the factor properly set in any manner anyways.
I think that the present crop are also of a second generation of units where the problems are mostly ironed out.
I would much rather keep the Wega than buy anything else of equal or lower cost. I don't like non-flat screens. A compromise for me would be to get a regular Trinitron, but I simply don't like the boobish shape of most CRTs. I didn't look hard but the Wegas were the only systems that I found to support the 16:9 format in rescanning, without making the DVD player rescale & loose 25% of the detail.
My only real complaint is that they are a tad expensive and they are _heavy_. 110lb for a 27" TV... a real hernia maker if you don't get help!
And 3Dfx...
I thought these cards have been out for a while. I remember seeing one on a web page somewhere. Anyway, wasn't HDTV (and SDTV) designed to work with a PC anyway? Didn't they do alot of the different HD resolutions so they could be displayed on the superior computer monitor? I am sorry but this just doesn't excite me. The fact that THERE ARE NO FULL HDTV's out there now. Every TV that they say are HDTV or Digital TV Ready require a convertor box! At least at Best Buy anyway. I want to get a HDTV for about the same price as a regular TV. I want to replace my TV's when they die with HDTV's for about 800 bucks. Why can't they do this??
Gorkman
I dunno that I was that unjustified in assuming that edge enhancement was a convoultion with a sharpening mask.
Doyou know the mask that was used to enhance the edges? Ifso, does it have an inverse? (img proc was too long ago to recall if all masks had inverses; I suspect not)
Do you know of some source of over-the-air HBO programming? The only source I know of is over cable networks and none of the cable networks deliver a signal that this board can read or store. If and when the usual networks (NBC, ABC, etc) deliver true HDTV content (not just the usual stuff upconverted to 1080i) and your local network affiliate is ready to deliver it (last I checked only PBS offers HDTV or at least DTV in the Twin Cities area), then you could record the 20 mbps signal to a hard drive. You might be able to transcode it to a Sorenson encoded stream on a DVD-RAM that would be playable on a DVD-ROM drive using QuickTime on a PC or Mac that could be better than a DVD Video.
HDTV ready or HDTV built in? I want it built in! I have enough CRAP attached to my TV.
Gorkman
This is a given since all DVD's at this present time have an NTSC encoded image for NTSC recievers like TV's, software decoders, hardware decoders and so on. Developers still have to solve the problem of writing dual layers on a DVD with a conventional DVD-RAM drive instead of `stamping` them like they do today to make writing a 1080i signal to DVD...Although I am waiting for the day.
Yes, I know the point is redundant, but `tis the facts folks.
That interpretation of the DMCA is scary. Heck, if I were to pirate DVDs, I'd need a power cord to power the computer. Since the power cord is capable of being used in the process of copying the DVDs it should be illegal. So now we can outlaw power cords. ;) Let's just be proactive, and outlaw everything. ;)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
But isn't it interesting that one of the first things to come out of everyone's mouth here is a comment indicating how easy this device will make DVD/HDTV/video piracy, plus discussions of how much of someone else's copyrighted material will fit on certain media?
Is it any wonder that the RIAA or MPAA suffer from paranoid psychosis? /.'ers go to awfully great lengths to oppose the RIAA's position, dogmatically insisting that piracy is a minimal drain in their overall business. But, when the RIAA comes and reads this article on Slashdot (which I'm sure they now track religiously), what do they see?
Furthermore, how many /.'ers complain that these groups shouldn't be afraid of piracy while they swap copyrighted materials themselves? How many of them would have a problem burning a DVD-RAM of an HDTV broadcast for their buddies? Do their buddies then go and do it for another friend, ad infinitum?
I'm not saying that this is either right or wrong--make up your own mind--but, how many of the RIAA & MPAA critics actually think critically about their own actions? Maybe piracy is a bigger problem than /.'ers and others on the "good" side like to admit, simply because they think that any piracy they engage in doesn't matter.
The only certainty is entropy.
Why? So we can see Oprah's wrinkles and zits that don't show up on regular TV? Seriously, what on Earth is on TV that we really need to have cleared up? I've got DSS with a hundred basic channels and yet I can still never find anything to watch. 99% of the time I end up flipping off the boob tube after 5 minutes of turning it on and walking back and getting on the net to do something. The only thing TV has going for it in my opinion is being a high bandwidth non-interactive push medium useful for things like watching election results when websites get overloaded! ;-)
Just a few thoughts.... how many people have giant 42"+ tvs, completely incapable of receiving the HDTV signal...
PCI Card: $400.00
80GB Firewire Drive: $380
(http://www.transintl.com)
CPU: $400.00
$1280 conversion kit for any TV....
BTW, to view the HDTV signal I dont think it'd be necessary to record it... so there wouldnt be any additional expense over the card.
Further note on the cheap drives... as soon as I save up $5000, I'm buying a firewire terabyte and attaching it to my iBook. Just cuz.
Half of the point of HDTV is the picture quality, which monitors do a much better job of showing than typical tvs do (as you already know if you have a tv card). I'd pay just to get rid of the ugly fuzziness.
-- Anne Marie
Only one problem with that plan, the standards haven't been agreed, the broadcast licences haven't been doled out (read: sold by a greedy govt for buttloads of cash), and there isn't any hardware on the shelves in stores.
He's dreaming son...
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Oh, and I'd need Linux drivers. Damned if I'm going to install 'doze to use any piece of hardware.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
According to the sites referenced here, this card, although quite nifty, takes up two PCI slots, not to mentino the external plug for remote and soforth.
:)
Doesn't this seem like a little much for a card that will function as at most, an addon? You don't expect something that isn't a system-critical function to take up this much.... and many people don't have two PCI slots free(including myself).
So why not just release a single card with say an external expansion like a breakout box, or something similar? In any case, this looks like a good card to have...now we know what ATI will be using for its next All-In-Wonder system
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Ahem. KV-32XBR400 and KV-36XBR400. These are 1080i, which means they're HDTV-ready.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Wait until someone combines it with something like FSCKTV. Presto: perfect digital recordings of descrambled channels. Soon, even the cable companies won't be getting their cut.
-- Anne Marie
It hardly seems worth using that much storage to my somewhat low fi tastes. Current NTSC resolution is wholly adequate for me. It is the message of the story that really counts, after all. Don't get me wrong, if it was affordable and terabyte scale storage was affordable to the average person, I would be much happier then without it...
But I would be much happier today if I could find a means to permanently archive my wealth of recorded [fair use, wink wink, although it was, afterall broadcast on cable services I subscribed to] media. I have several hundred VHS cassetes of programming [including every simpsons episode, every Pinky and the Brain episode, the State [long since cancelled sketch commedy show], etc. Perhaps not so much with the simpsons. I preserve things that you cannot buy in stores, anywhere, for I do not want them to slip away.
Probably for the same reason I tend to mirror sites I like. The recent flap with the death of Mathworld is a perfect example of the value of archiving. Web sites fit just fine on $0.44 CDR's, and so does music. But video is another beast, and I would be extremely happy if I could ever find an affordable option to digitally archive [even at less then broadcast quality] my videos, which are otherwise quietly degrading into noise.
My point is, that it's not so much ultra quality that matters, but longevity. If only MPG4 would come out, and someone would sell a hardware encoder. Sigh. [You still can't even buy MPG2 encoders for less then several thousand dollars, and MPG2 actually takes up -more- space the MPG1, [although the quality is actually at broadcast level, unlike MPG which isn't even at VHS-EP level.
--
man sig
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Well, many people think that everything about the DMCA is scary. But cheer up: at least it's uneforceable!
__________________
or!!!! with all do respect srew the projector, ill get big ass 21 inch monitor for good 1000 bucks in compusa (supersale) or some crap and for around 1300 i get HDTV, NOW that sureeee sounds interesting and beats the hell out the normal HDTV prices ANYWAY! so im down, great solution!
Istigkeit -"is-ness" being and becoming & i'dfiying it with the mathematical abstraction of the idea
Urm, not that I recall. There was a way to get a kind of random seed, using the R register. This wasn't random, though, it was incremented by one every clock cycle and used for the DRAM refresh cycles. But if you checked it at the start of execution, it could act as a random seed for your real random number generator.
Then there were the undocumented shift instructions. Basically, there was a batch of instructions that fitted into the scheme at a point that would logically be shift right, add carry, but for one opcode operating on (HL), it failed; always adding one, not the carry. But, this bug was repeatable, and so people used the instructions anyway. They just weren't documented because they didn't fit perfectly into the logical scheme.
Chances are REALLY good [...] won't have a Linux driver.. that wouldn't be a big deal if they'd just release the technical specs..
Yes, but with most things these days, it's hard to stay competitive if you publically disclose all your tricks of the trade. Particularly with hardware, if someone pinches your design, it's pretty hard to tell except by the interface it exposes to the outside world. In the old days, anyone releasing a clone of a Vic-20 would have it spotted as such (remember there were few custom logic chips), these days how would you prove that part of the internals of a graphics chip is a direct copy of part of your own? You can't short of probing it with an electron microscope or looking at the external interface to see how closely it matches your own. And lots of chip designers have deliberately undocumented stuff so that they can identify their own designs.
I need something explained here: NTSC is a crappy standard, compared to our old PAL system (less resolution, etc). We (in the UK) are pretty much all digital TV now. I have a box (which was free from the broadcaster OnDigital, and outputs high resolution TV. When you talk about HDTV, is digital TV what you mean? This UK Digital system still outputs to a 625line res, whether you use an integrated box or a Set-top. We have a thing called a tivo which is basically a big HDD that records TV, allows you to pause live TV etc.. This sounds a lot like the capabilities of the card mentioned. As for copyright issues, our boxes have MacroVision copy protection built in, due to the quality of the films being broadcast (especially on payperview). Granted, MacroVision isn't the most secure encryption ever, but I think you'll finf this card has a similar system. Ben^3
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
What? You wouldn't pay $4000 to get a clearer broadcast TV signal? For shame! Perhaps we can finally see those M.A.S.H. reruns in all their film-recorded splendor. Anyway, my 32" Toshiba TV is *fine* for me. I don't know why the government is demanding that broadcasters switch to purely HDTV. I have NO need for it. The little television I do watch looks fine to me. Besides, with a clearer picture that'll just be more inspiration to pirate the entire show right? I could be selling pirated copies of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to the Chinese with all the commercials easily digitally-edited out on my computer. Where is the MPAA to stop this madness! We all know what happened with CD's and now DVD's! Giving people clearer formats just inspires them to pirate more. ;-)
Machines are cheap enough that nobody who will spend the kind of money for this thing really needs to worry about the limitations or 2 pci slots. I have collected 4 junkers over the years so I can add tons of cards to my increasingly massive network. Never get rid of a machine. Just NETWORK!
According the original FCC mandate for HDTV, by 2006 all broadcast stations are supposed to cut off NTSC signals. But even if everyone, and I mean everyone coughs up the cash to buy a new set, the broadcast area pattern of an HD tower is reduced in half. So at least half the population would be unable to receive traditional through-the-air HD signals (or any TV for that matter- including tornado warnings, etc).
The magic number is 80%. If that number is reached within a station's "viewable area," then the switch must take place. But is that area calculated at current levels or the future halved area? If 80% of current broadcast area is the mandate (lawyers are still arguing over this), then the 80% level is impossible. HDTV can therefor never replace standard def for home broadcast.
HD will be used to project films for digital theatres because, although it does not look quite as good from a raw image quality standpoint, it is cheaper and more uniform in quality. And cheaper always wins.
But what, oh what, are those broadcasters going to do with all that bandwidth the government just gave away five years ago? ABC is no longer broadcasting Monday Night Football in HD. The Tonight Show may cut back its HD service soon. What's next?
ridiculopathy.com - We're trying hard to not talk about the election...
I checked out the website. It only decodes MPEG2
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
Here in Australia, everything that's on free-to-air will also be digitally broadcast as of 01-01-2001 (we've only got five free-to-air channels, but then again we've also only got the population of New York City :-).
Digital and analogue simulcasting will persist for at least another eight years, and by then SDTV digital sets should be no more expensive than analogue ones are now, so nobody's too pressured to upgrade.
How much of that digital broadcasting will actually be HDTV and not SDTV, I don't know. But the broadcaster are required to squirt out some quantity of HDTV even from the start, so there'll be something for early adopters to drool over :-).
Link, for anyone who cares: www.dba.org.au/Q&A/Alst on_DTV_Q&A.htm
First off, even if the filter is reversible, unless you know the exact parameters that were used when it was applied, you can't cleanly remove it. You might get something that's "good enough" using trial-and-error, but that would be a lot of trouble.
Secondly, for DVD production, edge enhancement is applied before compression. After the image is compressed, a lot of the data (the parts that an average viewer supposedly "wouldn't notice") is gone. Reconstructing the non-edge enhanced image would be further hindered by this fact, although I'm not sure how much of an effect it would have.
Lastly, the way edge enhancement is done for DVDs tends to destroy data in high-contrast parts of the image, making it irreversable, even if you know exactly what the algorithm and its parameters were. Any place where there is an "edge", defined as a sudden change from light to dark values, the algorithm exaggerates this change by making the light values lighter and the dark values darker. Unfortunately, this can lead to "clipping", where some of the variation in brightness is destroyed becase all the values in a part of the image were pegged against the maximum or minimum values.
Doing a guassian blur might help to smooth out the enhanced edges, but it would not eliminate them. It would, however, destroy a lot of information in the rest of the picture. Once the picture has been run through an edge enhancer, there's almost no way to make it look the way it did before.
Take a look at the recently released "Braveheart" disc. In some of the battle scenes, you can see shots where people's spears or swords are held up against the sky. Look closely and you'll notice a slight ringing around them. This is due to edge enhancement. The pixels containing sky that are right up against the edge of the spears have been lightened, which produces a bizzare-looking outline around the spear. It just looks awful, if you ask me. When are the DVD production houses going to learn that movies look better without performing edge enhancement?
Free Hans!
SGI makes a nice 16:9 digital flat panel.
Personally I don't care about HDTV right now. I'd much rather have an affordable wide-screen TV like you can get in Europe. One step at a time, eh?
Besides, why would you want to watch television - even if it is HDTV - on you computer? How many people have big huge 27in computer monitors, or have their monitor somewhere where they can sit and watch it in comfort?
As Far as I know, the offical "turn-off" date for non-HDTV signals has been scheduled for 2006, and has been for quite some time.
I used to hate computers, but then a server went down on me.
A great tool for pirates. Come on I could save a DVD on to a disk and then I all I have to do is burn to another DVD.
The reason they don't make them smaller than about 40 inches is because there is very little point. On a 14 inch television, the screen would be small enough not to need that kind of resolution.
mhhh why to hell use this upcoming suff an old codec like mpg2 ?, with mpg4 the effictive bandwith is reduced and the number of channels increases !!
I thought of the Hauppage card too, but upon closer inspection, it seems the WinTV-D downsamples all signals to 480i before displaying them. Thus you can tune HDTV signals, but you can only watch them as SDTV.
Telemann's Sky Media 2000 card has had official linux support for a while now. Since their intended audience surely coincides well with linux users, it'll be an aberration if they don't provide linux support here.
-- Anne Marie
I bet the makers of this PCI card will be required to pay extortion fees to the MPAA on the basis of each unit that is sold. Kinda like the RIAA and CD-Roms.
How is it that the MPAA and RIAA can extort media player manufacturers like that?
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Umm, if you have the money to burn, nothing beats watching HDTV brodcasts of friends while hacking code ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
HDTV is higher res than SVGA, but who uses SVGA anymore? The maximum horizontal resolution for HDTV is something like 1200-something, while on a monitor it is 1840 (for highest quality monitors.) A 1280x1024 capable monitor should be easily able to display HDTV.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Hardware stuff is only part of it. If you look at the general quality of driver, you'll notice too kinds. Crappy ones, and solid ones. Those with the solid/featureful drivers are (rightfully) reluctant to give an advantage to those with crappy drivers.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Free OS and PCI shouldn't be used in the same sentence without an odd number of negatives. Except of course in a statement saying: "Free OS and PCI shouldn't be used in the same sentence without an odd number of negatives."
http://siokaos.org/
-Dave
that's why. There are 3 alternatives - watching HDTV on a HDTV (which is too expensive); watching HDTV on a normal telly, using a set-top box (thereby losing the high definition, so what's the point); & finally using a HDTV card equiped computer (which give you the benefit of utilising the computer monitor's High definition screen at the price of a set-top box). Remember 17" monitors are dirt cheap these days & 19" monitors are pretty cheap too, you just have to sit a little closer than you would with a 23" telly & you get the same effect, but in high definition. Which is the whole point of the exercise.
I just bought a 27" Sony Wega (ruler-flat) tube TV and a I love it.
Dude... Do a search on the Wega's, and look at all the problems they've had. If I were you, I'd take the Wega back and get a higher-end Panasonic, you'll save money, and get a better set. But that's just my opinion (although, I do own an A/V store...)
-This sig intentionally left blank
....where there might not be enough room for both a telly & computer monitor. This is particully pertinent if your sharing a flat with someone & your the one with the 2nd smaller bedroom. Or take the case of kids, its a way of saving money -as you know kids like to have both the telly & the computer on at once, this way way only one CRT is running in their room/s which helps keep the power bills lower.
Look at it this way. I'm still waiting for updated software/drivers for my STB card for Win98, and I know 3dfx ain't gonna give 'em to me. My friend's off-brand TV card won't work in Win 2000, and I doubt he'll get new drivers for that.
What are the odds it'll ship with support for any Free OSes? honestly? i would say zero; every TV card i've ever seen is marketed to the lowest common denominator (which, obviously, isn't linux users).
A beowulf cluster of these... ..oh, sorry, nevermind :-)
Digger
-- Don't you love a world where they give paranoid sociopaths guns, and tell them to shoot traitors and subversives?
note: following comments from Scotland
What's this "TV" thing??? Will it replace my wire-less which myself and the family sit round, playing cards and 'knitting' ??!
Remote storage on a site like Streamload.com is a much better preservation mechanism (let them do it) than maintaining media yourself.
I agree entirely with your sentiments, but when you got a minimal percentage of the desktop market few companies will be willing to spend the cash developing drivers for you. They're far more concerned with getting the thing to market in a timely manner.
Besides, they probably have a busload of cheap PC developers to use, as opposed to trying to find decent UNIX people.
Yes, but the rest of us who don't live at home, and actually have their own places tend to have a lounge with a TV in it.
... the last thing I need is more whirring fans.
My lounge is my chill-out area where I can get away from computers
And it only uses one PCI slot, even though the connectors are spread over two plates.
--
This is a neat product, but it's not really worth much hype. One you add a box to power and control it, you get a competativly priced HDTV tuner (once you ignore the fact that the others can often tune sattelite TV as well.) The VCR functionality sounds pretty cool as well. What this is not, is the card that will let you play HDTV in a window on your monitor. To do that you either need to stick the tuner and decoder on the system video board or be willing to saturate most of the 64-bit/66Mhz PCI bus your PC probably doesn't have.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
Wireless connectivity is fast outpacing your projected needs. With devices like DVDanwhere, you can (today) broadcast a video signal from your computer to any tv in the house. Store video on the computer and broadcast it to your tvset in the bedroom, or whatever. It becomes a PITA as far as the remote-control issue goes, but x10 will gladly sell you something to help with that too. (Just never, NEVER, give them a valid email address unless you want daily spam.)
-- Anne Marie
I just bought a 27" Sony Wega (ruler-flat) tube TV and a I love it. Sony has finally created a set that doesn't look like a tube at all. The set uses a FD Trinitron tube and the front glass essentially acts as a lens, so the screen is both vertically and horizontally flat. I'm using component video inputs (Monster Cable Component Video 3) to my DVD player, and the TV has an anamorphic 16:9 squeeze feature - very cool. It basically squeezes the TV's 4:3 viewing area into that of a 16:9 TV, roughly 1.85:1. I have my DVD player thinking that it's connected to a 16:9 HDTV set, so it sends an anamorphic signal and the TV does the squeezing itself. Anamorphic signal = highest picture quality.
So, until there are many stations that broadcast in HDTV (don't all have to by 2006?), I'll be happy with my Wega. The picture is fantastic.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
When posting to Slashdot in HTML, long URLs get ugly spaces added to them. It's some parsing bug in Slash, and it seems like it's a word-wrapping kind of bug, where it puts in a space to appease the margin gods.
To avoid them, put a space after the quotes, before the angle-bracket.
<a_href=_"http://really.long/url/path/"_> http://really.long/url/path/ </a>
Anyway, that gets around most of the added spaces in the visible text inside the A.../A range. If your URL is really long, and Slash is breaking that, well, your options are limited.
I can't see how this PCI card would replace TV. The largest monitor today is 21" and at the cost of $900+ So lets do a little math.
$900+ for monitor
$400 for PCI card
$600+ for computer
--------
$1900+ for a HDTV to be watched on a 21" monitor.
Well, this is just too expencive for your average home user. At that price most home users would get the HDTV on a Sony flat screen TV at 36" and actualy be able to do something with it such as use it.
Folks, it's time to stop craming everthing in one thing and try to be everything for everyone.
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
The GeForce 2 would be AGP - which is a separate bus from the Northbridge... That frees up one (though most boards top out at 5 slots, some have 6)...
;-)
The easiest thing to do is get a board with two PCI busses...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
What resolution is your projector capable of?
HDTV is higher res than most monitors on the market today, let alone projectors...
I guess the card could have some sort of scale-down.. but still, you'd be losing pixels. I'd prefer a nice 16x9 HDTV set.
Yup, I already do this and it's great. I believe my Hauppage card has a Bt878 chip in it which works perfect with Linux. There's a 2-minute radio programme I record every day since I would miss it otherwise. And watching the Simpsons while surfing or coding is great.
Or at least it was until we got the satellite. It's a dual LNB which is good but that means I need a second decoder. I had found a German company who made satellite PCI cards (you put yer smart card into the slot provided on the card and it decoded the signal according to what you had paid for) -- Has anyone heard of these and are they satellite independent? i.e. I'm on ExpressVu here in Canada -- if I had the right smart card in the computer could I receive/decode the ExpressVu datastreams? What about if I purchased a DirecTV or StarChoice subscription and re-aimed the dish? That's the only thing that's holding me back is compatibility issues. :-(
I watched television on a 14" set until last year, when I bought a 25" Sony. Further, I quite happily watch DVD's on my 17" monitor. Sure, a big screen is nice, but not essential. If it requires a big screen to enjoy it, go to the cinema.
Yes, I am among the minority who only infrequently watch a film a second time, and then only the smaller, more intimate foreign/subbed titles. In other words, I'd never watch TPM at home, anyway, so a 17" screen is ample.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Not that I have any doubts that they are looking for a way to attack, but I wonder: how? RIAA wasn't able to touch mp3.com until they foolishly started my.mp3.com.
As far as I know, this card doesn't break any laws. So as long as Telemann doesn't have any contractual limitations (the way that the MPEG decoder card manufacturers apparently do), MPAA may not have any grounds to sue them. Their only resort might be to go back to congress and buy some more legislation in order to retroactively cause this stuff to become outlawed.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not sure about telemann, because their servers have been soundly /.ed so I haven't seen their product, but hauppage hasn't been hit too hard yet, so I've checked it out.
The Hauppage solution downsizes any signal it gets to 480i before displaying it. If the telemann solution will display, for example, 720p at native resolutions, it'll kick the hauppage card's ass.
I personally think 720p is the superior format over what was listed as the 'highest': 1050i. Sure, the resolution is slightly less, but 720 pixels ought to be big enough for pretty much anyone (at least, on a TV or monitor), and the progressive scanning eliminates messiness with pausing, motion jagginess (every other line being one frame out of sync becomes very noticeable when high-contrast objects are moving at high speed, but is visible whenever objects are in motion), and conversion to the progressive-scanning that CRTs use. In short, the image is slightly smaller, but higher-quality.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
There's a really great guide to anamorphic DVDs and their relationship to HDTV sets available online. It goes quite a bit into the emerging HDTV sets, as well as detailing why you should buy DVDs only if they are anamorphic (e.g. enhanced for 16:9 TVs), especially if you ever plan on watching them on a HDTV set (which do have a 16:9 aspect ratio).
The Digital Bits Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic Widescreen DVD (for Dummies!)
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Isn't PAL better quality (more scan lines) than NTSC though? And in the UK some of the new digitalTV broadcasts are in widescreen format (is that the same as HDTV?) Surely with MPG2 satellite broadcasts they could sacrifice some bandwidth to provide HDTV signals?
Deja moo - The feeling you've heard all this bull before.
I'm naive about these new television technologies.
What is the difference between HDTV and DigitalTV? Hauppauge has had a PCI DigitalTV card for some time now. Until just now, I thought it was an HDTV card.
NOTE:
Many Hauppauge cards have Linux support already.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Video Display
As I understand it, it can either display on a dedicated monitor or (in standard def) using overlay.
I salute you....
What I think I'll do is stick with the 20" widescreen TV that I have. (Well, not really Widescreen. Has some feature that Samsung calls "Vision+" which decodes more columns of resolution, and puts it out on a 16x9 screen.) For all of $450 (Canadian, that's what, $0.25 US?).
When/if the HDTV signal becomes manditory (BTW, I'm pretty sure its 2003 in Canada), the Cable co's will have to provide their users with HDTV-NTSC decoder boxes without charge. I'll be capitalizing on that until the price for true HDTV, Plasma display TV's become affordable. ($25k is a little too rich for a TV, methinks.)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
i watch a circa 1979 12 inch black and white tv.
Now that is retro!
Are there broadcasts in HDTV or at least plans for HDTV in Europe?
I haven't heard anything about it for some time, and the current digital programs (d-box) are using standard resolution (720 x 576).
Um. How did you get in? I checked the logs but didn't find anything!
Hah! I deleted your logs right after I installed my ph34rsome r00tK1t. Your IP address is being broadcast on irc channel:5uX0r right now!
Here we have a hardware device which does almost exactly the same things that DeCSS does, with the same "feared" effect by the MPAA: being able to record mpeg-2 directly to your hard drive.
This seems like it would be in direct conflict with the MPAA's position on DeCSS... Is it possible that this product's release may cause a stir in the DeCSS case [ MPAA | 2600/Burns ], particularly in the view of copying digial media of which one already has a copy? Seems evident to me - hopefully the same sentiment will creep into the heads of everyone involved in the case.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Read my plan to save the Bengals
But be very glad the US is using the standard that they finally settled on. Japanese viewers are getting fucked. Sure their HDTV sets may (now) cost half as much, but DAMN....does regular TV look like shit on those things. Not only that, I've only seen ONE japanese HDTV that even comes CLOSE to what (little) I've seen in the US, even with an HDTV signal. (Enormous color problems, jaggies, some slight ghosting...almost as bad as with the regular NTSC signals on some sets. heh...not that there is a lot worth watching on Japanese TV anyhow.)
HD is great - the problem is content - no one wants to create content for sets that aren't out there, and no one wants to buy sets without content. Add to this that MPAA(&*(holes don't want to release content w/out copy proctection. Now throw in the jerks at (brain fade - can't remember) who are trying to delay hd deployment because of the cost involved, and it makes a mess.
/.d but if you look at this card make certain that it actually does output 720p or 1080i, and is not some pos converter to 480i, ie a regular tv tuner.
I can't look at the site
Pinnacle was working on such a card, but have pulled the plug on it for now - too bad, they make good equipment.
You should be able to find local content if you are in a major market, and if you are in silicon valley, you have a lot of choices - almost everyone is at least transmitting digital simulcast, and some true hd content.
To quickly address the comment about 1080i vs 1080p, the reason for 1080i at the time the standard was created - in the mid 80's, was acquisition problems - 1080p wasn't possible, and even now the cost is very high.
What would be a great thing to do is create a HD recorder of some type and GPL/open source it so that it can exist w/out implementing any form of copy protection - it would be nice to edit out the commercials for example, before MPAA and co prevent it.
sorry if my comment is disjointed, im a techie, not a writer...
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
>this will beat the hell out of a grainy ATI All-in-wonder or similar product
I don't know about that... I've got an ATI TV-Wonder Pro. ($95 Canadian, http://www.rbcomputing.com/) I'm decoding at 512*384 resolution, and it doesn't look too grainy. The only thing I don't like is that the picture is solid mauve on the second head of my display.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Well, you're perfectly welcome to do that with an analog format, but if it is digital, and has any sort of digital copy protection (no matter how feeble) you're a criminal, and should turn yourself into the MPAA for a caning.
Or you can do what judge whatshisface reccomended and stick to analog copying, which of course isn't made illegal by the DMCA.
Maybe they realized it would get hacked days after release so they didn't bother.
Not to mention Hauppauge
I agree entirely with your sentiments, but when you got a minimal percentage of the desktop market few companies will be willing to spend the cash developing drivers for you.
... I mean, they just have to publish the HW guide they give to their own ppl, wait a couple of weeks, and then post the driver on their site ...
But then why won't they let US do the developing for them? For free
I don't have/want a larg screen TV even for HDTV but eventually HDTV will replace NTSC or at least thats the plan. It probably will never happen.
In any case. I have a CRT capable of HDTV.. it's call my SVGA.. I use it to watch TV allready..
In fact my computer screen was ALLWAYS my TV set.
Originally back in Vic20 days.. my TV was my computer screen.. Eventually my TV was a VCR plugged into my computer monitor (Capable of CGA and composit video) Add a switch becouse I had a C128 and a 64+Mimic plugged in to it (Yes they produced a limited number of Mimics.. mine died)
There was a simple TV tuner that you could plug into a composit monitor and then plug your home computer into it.
So.. yeah.. people have been doing THAT for years..
An old Byte mag cover comes to mind OFTEN showing a Mac plus shapped computer with Mr Spock on the screen and the number 2 in the upper cornner.
The idea presented in that mag was eventually the home computer would REPLACE TV. (With streamming media this is allready startting to happen.. but may take a long time).
TV cards have been around for a LONG time.. I have one myself but thats more for my webcam..
It makes sence to me anyway.. the big cost of a TV set is the CRT.. why buy more than one?
Put your DVD drive, TV card, HDTV card, into a computer and buy one nice CRT...
Annother issue is CRTs burn out... get broken etc.. ever TV I ever owned eventually died when the CRT died.
I'd much rather buy ONE crt and maintain it.. instead of 2 or more...
Monitors get nicer and nicer.. bigger and cheaper.. every year.
Eventually I'll be able to afford a nice LCD screen...
and buying the monitor your paying for the CRT and the electronics to mainatin a crisp clean image.
I don't need to pay for the electronics that bring my HDTV or NTSC or PAL video..
It's all on my computer...
I don't actually exist.
IMHO, slim chance to none. At least initialy.
just my $.02
"I'm making perfect sense, you're just not keeping up."
compared to buying a new TV set, a card like this seems like a smart idea
At close to 8 gigs an hour you might just spend as much on new drives as a new TV. Especially if you subscribe to the *dirty* channels...
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
This is way cheaper than even the cheapest real HDTV that I know of. Notice how there aren't any "normal" HDTVs? No 20 inchers. They're all at least 40 inches, and many are even bigger. There is a Sony Wega which is relatively small, but it's absurdly expensive, of course, because it's a Wega. $400, though, that's a different story. Combined with hard disk recording, this is pretty nifty. It's still not cheap by any means, but much more so than a real TV (which, admittedly, is bigger).
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
The MPAA is going to love this...
How long do you think it will be before they sue these guys or force them to add copy protection of some sort?
There are cable/sat channels (HBO for example) that broadcast feature length movies in HDTV, and with this card you can make perfect digital recordings.
Sure you need 15 gigs a movie when you first record them but can can always compress them using DivX or some other codec.
I smell law suit.
The other guy is wrong. You can encode DivX in realtime. I do it all the time on my system, and my system sucks compared to most. K6-2 500, 128M RAM.
Anyway, I'm able to encode it quite easily as I watch TV on my card. Granted, DivX mangles the picture at times, but at TV resolutions it's acceptable. And because the recorded video is a fraction of the normal size, your hard drive speed isn't as much of a concern.
_______________
you may quote me
I have only one question. When are we going to see 16:9 aspect ratio monitors? What good is a HDTV receiver without the proper aspect ratio display device? (Well, that was two questions :))
Come get some for free!! iPhone!!!!
Ok so the perfect output device for the HDTV could just be this 42 inch plasma flat panel but where do we source a HDTV signal?
Can anyone actually get this via cable or satelite? Whats the other hardware requirements invloved in the ultimate HDTV experience?
You could easily then use DivX to compress them to something much more reasonable in size--900 Kbps (smaller case b!) still looks about as good as old school broadcast tv and much better than VCR. Makes things about 400 megs/hr. Plus, when you give a copy to your friend, it doesn't look worse for the wear. I'd be interested to know the legality of doing this off of somewhere like HBO--the quality would be as good as a DVD, right? But you are definitly allowed to tape movies off of HBO and watch them later (unless thats been taken away too.) (ducks as all the film heads come out to decry the end of western civilization as precipitated by digital compressed video)
/* This post not warrantied for mission critical applications. */
I bought a TV card for it and, much to my surprise, found myself watching TV so much on the PC that I got rid of the television set in the room. An HDTV card (and a rather affordable one, at that) would be great, if it'll eventually work in Linux.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
honestly? i would say zero; every TV card i've ever seen is marketed to the lowest common denominator (which, obviously, isn't linux users).
gotta say though, this will beat the hell out of a grainy ATI All-in-wonder or similar product.
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Not in Europe, we won't. Do we even have a standard set yet?
I dont know about all you rich, have to have every new thing people. But how about something like this for good old TV???? I know I wouldnt mind every simpson's episode stored on my hard drive even if it looks shitty on my monitor.
The new digital system is actually DVB, which is totally abstracted from PAL, obviously the old PAL broadcasts still exist.
... they up the quality.
... a highend Sony PAL+ set cost about the same a few months back.
The DigitalTV system deployed in the UK by the BBC and around Europe and the Middle East actually scales to variable bitrates depending upon the broadcast.
The DVB mpeg2 stream can scale between SDTV and HDTV qualities, you may of noticed this if you've watched football matches on Sky
You're correct about the prices of the sets, a highend Sony 16:9 set with an intergrated digital tuner, 100hz screen refresh, dolby pro logic, retails for about £900
Az.
Yes sir, you need to invest in a TV tuner card. At bare minimum. Get a TV tuner card that has record to disk options, plug your VCR into it, and start archiving your oldest data onto CD-R. If you've got stuff that's as old as the first Simpson's broadcasts, you aren't kidding that it's slowly degrading into noise. The lifetime of videotape is supposed to be around 7 years, for the recorded data, if I remember corruptly. (pun intended)
Yes, it will take a long time, but you sir, sound like a serious videophile. My parents have huge, incredibly huge archives of stuff that I'm sure has degraded into nothingness by now, also. So you're certainly not the only one.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
So you can buy a DigitalTV that doesn't do HD, or you can buy a HDTV that does it all. For now.
Usually you're buying a monitor that is spec'd for its capable resolutions, and you'll buy the tuner seperately, and if you're not using an HD set, somewhere in there scan lines will be discarded. The monitor, I suppose.
Here is Best Buy's attempt at an explanation.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
What are the odds they won't sue when people write a drivers for Free OSes....
Steve
i watch a circa 1979 12 inch black and white tv.
:)
I've been wanting to fit a TV card for a while. Anyone know if there are (going to be) any cards with hardware MPEG4 or DivX encoding built in? That would save a lot of diskspace and time fooling around with the compression tools.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Someone said, "Besides, why would you want to watch television - even if it is HDTV - on you computer? How many people have big huge 27in computer monitors, or have their monitor somewhere where they can sit and watch it in comfort?" Believe it or not, there are thousands of people who use their PC as the signal processing center of a home theater system. You can check out the bulletin board of a large user community at http://www.avsforum.com I myself use a PC and its DVD-ROM drive to watch DVD's with stunning results from my Compaq MP1600 projector on a 120 inch diagonal screen. Yes, that's 10 feet. My desire for HDTV on a PC should be obvious. By the way, you can get an excellent XGA projector for home theater for around $3,000. Front projection isn't ideal for everybody, for example you need to watch it in a darkened room for optimal results. But a 10 foot HDTV image for $3k (projector) + $400 PC-Card sure beats the pants off of most other HDTV solutions.
Interesting ...
I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of access control/ Intellectual Property protection mechanisms incorporated into this device.
Sincerely,
Vergil
Insects and Grafitti Photos
1) VGA Passthrough (I'm allergic to these)
2) Occupies 2 PCI slots
3) No encoding... but in way this is a benefit, too, 'cuz it damn well gaurantees that you are recording the virgin signal.
Tastes Like Chicken
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know where they get off saying they are the 'first', because Hauppage has had a similar card out for a while. Mandatory Links: http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/html/wintv-d.pdf http://www.hauppage.com/html/products.htm I apologize if I'm incorrect.
Sure, I understand, who wants to watch television on their computer, right? But still, there seems to be a market for TV tuner cards, so... That, and it would not surprise me to see a future in which either your TV has storage built in, or your TV and computer can share a storage volume (your PC saves to disk, you enjoy what you recorded in front of the TV in the family room).
hussar
Bureaucracy loves company.
My entertainment center is rigged with fans blowing 144cfm though it....I can never get away! ;-)
Has anyone noticed they don't sell from their web page, and they don't give you info on where to get one either. does anyone here know where they're sold?
I current have At&T's digital cable. I don't have a clue what is going on behind the scenes, but from the macroblock artifacts on the screen it looks like it uses MPEG2 to transmit channels. Could I use this card to watch channels on a PC? If so, how does the cable company control what channels you can/cannot watch? i.e. We have to pay extra for all the movie channels. Are they broadcast in an encrypted form, or is there clear-text message in each channel telling each box what it can view? Can someone shed some light on this, or point to a FAQ?
---
-- Virtual Windows Project
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yes, the UK now has almost blanket coverage of digital PAL broadcasts, either terestial broadcasts, Satelite, or Cable. More and more programs are also being broadcast in Widescreen by BBC & Sky, and you certainly go out and buy a Widescreen TV for the same price as a standard TV with very little effort. So at least we have that.
HDTV though? No. I wouldn't be surprised to see Sky or the BBC experimenting with HDTV systems in the near future, but i can't see it hapening in the UK for at least 10 years, and even then i have a feeling takeup would be slow. We do have a date for stoping all analog broadcasts though (2010 iirc)
I think you could argue that this is a tool for breaching copyright, in violation of the DMCA. I stress the word argue -- some lawyer somewhere is undoubtedly preparing a brief as we speak.
Hey, maybe that's good news. This might be the issue that gets the DMCA declared unconstitutional.
__________________
Hauppage's WinTV cards do this for standard TV. The low end starts at around $50, and there are (unofficial, I think) linux drivers and software. There are also a number of free projects in the works that will offer Tivo-style digital video recording using these cards soon. (You can already set up recording with cron)
to learn how to use mpeg 4 to save it to a CD with virtually NO loss in picture quality.
It's pretty frickin' cool, if you've got the horse power under the hood.
KFG
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!