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ATi's All In Wonder Radeon 7500
FlippedBit writes "ATi has released a very affordable All In Wonder product based on their Radeon 7500 chip. For a mere $200 smackers you can get decent 3D graphics, TV Tuner, TiVO functions, and a remote that will work from another room with no line of sight."
and it's not with the hardware but the software that gives you the TiVo like operation...
it doesn't work without a massive fight under windows 2000. it is the same software suite that comes with the TV wonder from ATI and their multimedoa center just sucks.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The remote uses (RF) Radio Frequency, not IR (InfraRed). IR has to have line of sight. That's how it can go through walls.
I have an old Dish Network receiver that uses an RF remote. It's great if you're listening to the CD channels piped through a home speaker system, and you want to change the channel blind (like you have the channel order memorized) but besides that it's worthless because you can never buy a replacement remote or integrate with a decent home theater controller. Of course there's a guy on the net selling an IR "upgrade" kit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was just telling a customer that I didn't know of any easy way (read: my grandma can do it way) to turn his PC into a TiVo-like device. Looks like this might be it -- shall have to do some more research when I get to work.
On the other hand, while I think that the price is great for what you get on this card, we've sold AIW cards for less than that before, so I'm not sure I'd mark it as "affordable" for someone who wanted just a "basic" AIW card. Still, a damn cool looking card.
I have been using this AIW Radeon as well as the old AIW Radeon for a long time now and it is no where near the TIVO status. Why? I hate to say it / point out the obvious -- ATI's Drivers and Software suck. They are the major suck. Until 7.6 came out, when you fast forwarded you had no idea how many seconds / frames you skipped and it was never consistant. Also, pausing (the greatest TIVO feature imho) often causes crashes, as does pausing then playing then FF over comercials or slow parts. (This comes on a win98, win2k, and winxp boxes all that w/o TV card get months of up time, and the crashes are clearly TV card related). Their guide software, although free, is worth what you paid for it. Its total poo - and it takes forever to upload it.
Also, recording on your PC from VCR (home movies anyone?) can be a real bitch if you dont read the rage3d faqs.
The controls are also still very icky. The program scheduling and recording leaves much to be desired (if its going, thats all you get from your TV card - no way to record one show and watch another -- even if your machine has the horse power, this card does not). Then, to find out what show you have scheduled and whatnot, you have to find the tab in the options and thats a shitty interface to begin with.
Also, when you install the MMC7.x which is required to give you the drivers for TV overlay and the program to watch TV, you get all kinds of other shit and program association take over (you can say not to install the shit but then when you play back recorded shows, they dont show right a lot of times w/o the ATI File Player)
Simply said - the card may be good - but the software leaves much to be desired - and it is far FAR from Tivo quality atm
(Please in the replies, if you know of good alternative software let me know - same if you know how to more or less make something of a decent tivo clone using an AIW + Linux)
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
and it works really good (the remote is really well designed) with one or two exceptions that I was pretty much ready for: Using a TV as your monitor sucks. The text is unreadable, even set to a larger size. The TV picture in a window looks really clear on the TV and monitor. However, if you maximize the tv picture (when using the TV as your monitor), the resolution goes to shit and the TV picture isn't that clear. The Tivo software works good but the TV guide program doesn't seem to work with DirecTV but I haven't really tried hard yet. It was really easy to install on XP but under 98 (don't ask) it had serious issues which were probably related to the machine I was using.
The Radeon line is works under Linux as do most ATi cards. The cooperate with open source developers to produce open source drives. They provide full documentation and say "have fun". ATi developers are free to help out in their spare time and in fact if I'm not mistaken, do.
NVidia's is like a bratty girlfriend:
When they are good, they are very very good.
When they are bad, they are rotten.
I've had the experience with NVIDIA drivers working perfect on one machine, and on another it randomly crashes all the time.
I just bought an ati7000 for building an audio machine (no emphasis on graphics) and the 3d accell worked alsmo outta the box on a debian "testing" install (I had to switch it so the agpart module was loaded BEFORE the radeon module).
I'm tired of reading about the people that have it work "perfectly" at the expense of those that don't. I've had it both ways, and I like the ATI way better.
(however the ATI drivers need to be labeled better, they refer to things like radeon VE, while consumers just know radeon 7000,7500,8500)
I have a Radeon All-in-one, and while I agree that the ATI software is not strong, I simply use ShowShifter for the TV stuff.
It is a great piece of software-- works really well on a regular TV as well.. combined with a logitech wireless keyboard and a B & O TV, and I'm a happy tv watcher.
It even recompresses your recordings in the background so you can do archiving of your sheduled shows..
1. Not all channels seem to be supported by the Guide+ guide... (Oxygen, WB, and a few others in my area) (Note that you can still record shows on these channels, but you have to program it as you would a traditional VCR) 2. Recording quality is great, but when watching TV in "TV On Demand Mode" (where you can pause, fast forward, rewind, etc..) the quality card is less than perfect at lip-synch'ing... and this can be quite annoying. 3. You don't want to have your computer be doing much else while recording shows... (The card has often decided it was in my best interest to *not* record certain shows that I had earmarked...) 4. This card is designed to not record anything that has been protected with macrovision... (Some forum users elsewhere have reported success in bypassing this, though) All in all, I am very happy with this card, as I use it primarily to record shows when I'm not around for archival purposes. If you want perfection and true TV on Demand, I'd suggest TIVO instead...
While I'm not religious about open source, nVidia's drivers in combination with my AMD Athlon CPU and chipset have created numerous problems. For instance, X would randomly lockup leaving no errors in the logs AFAICT. In the end, thanks to the great documentation at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/nvidia_tsg.html, I disabled AGP entirely by using Option "NvAGP" "0" in XF86Config. Earlier, I had fought a losing battle - tinkering with the BIOS, messing around with agpgart etc. to no avail. Finally, I have a stable nVidia XFree86 configuration but it took a while to get there.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
tivo clone... that's kinda easy/hard
a bt878 capture card - elcheapo is best.
a hollywood+ mpeg playback card.. dirt cheap on ebay... DO NOT PAY the $79.95 retail for these.. only complete idiots are trying to sell them for more than $45.00 I get the mall the time for $29.00 on ebay.
a old P-II machine and nuppelvideo for recording and mplayer for playback.
Add a web-based scheduler and you are done.. no you dont get pause tv, or the other fluff but you do get it recording your shows... showtime every friday at 1045pm est for 1 hour.. is not difficult to program
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
ATIs policy is that they don't produce drivers for Linux. However, they have established a relationship with open source developers and provided all of the specifications for their hardware. It is my understanding that currently the Radeon series has good 2D acceleration in X, but the 3D acceleration portions (MESA et al) is still in the works. It will likely be month before we start seeing advanced features like the T&L they have been touting available for Linux.
ATI does not support any of their consumer products under linux. However the GATOS Project supports most function under linux, including the remote.
I have this card. I bought it so that I could use one card to play 3D games and do video capture. Well I can play games just fine, except for commercial version of tuxracer that just doesn't want to start, however I have not been able to do video capture. Others on the Gatos mailing list have also been having similar problems. The good old Hauppage WinTV cards work really well for TV capture and even have Video4Linux2 drivers.
If you're just using Linux, you'll need to upgrade to XFree86 4.2 just to get the card working. The Linux drivers are more stable, at least. I've had two crashes and occasional texture corruption (with a few pixels of rainbow colors!?) while playing Wolfenstein, but no problems in 2D or with OpenGL screensavers.
Oh, and of course dual-head doesn't seem to want to work in either OS (Windows makes a valiant effort).
Maybe I just got a bad card out of the box, but the relative stability in Linux makes that seem doubtful. A friend of mine had similar problems with a Radeon 8500 and the CD drivers, but in his case the first update to drivers off ati.com fixed things.
Another advantage is that it's a stand-alone device. You can plug a VCR in one side, a DV camera into another, and do the conversion automatically. Works with ANY platform that has 1394 inputs and drivers.
Best Slashdot Co
On a positive note, the ATI All In Wonder series offers a lot of value packed features include the Multi Media Center not available with other capture cards. Mostly, like being able to record LEXX with the digital VCR feature when I know I wont be home on a Friday night. Then I can watch it later and not mess with videotape!
With that said, I would like to offer a very serious warning. This warning is to those considering the purchase of any ATI capture card. For I, will never purchase another ATI product again.
My intention was to ARCHIVE all of my existing and aging VHS multimedia. This is permitted under the terms of copyright law as "Fair Use". I have some really good movies I purchased on VHS over the years and I cannot afford to replace the entire collection on DVD, even it they were all available on DVD. Besides, I have already paid for the movies. I can't help it if the tapes are going bad.
Macrovision, an anti-copy technology implemented on VCR's over ten years ago is still being used today in more effective forms. It prevents you from being able to dub a video onto another tape from VCR to VCR. Computer digital capture doesn't even notice Macrovision and will capture any VHS tape.
Our friends at ATI are in bed with those anti-copy groups. They intentionally built in measures to DETECT Macrovision and PREVENT capture from any VHS or DVD that uses this anti-copy technology. They did this on purpose. VCR's suffer the Macrovision effect mostly my accident since Macrovision tricks the automatic gain circuit in them. There is no AGC circuit in video capture boards, at least not in the way there is in a VCR. So ATI went out of their way to cripple the capabilities of an otherwise good capture card. They didn't even have to do this by law. There are plenty of other capture cards that completely ignore Macrovision.
Also, what ATI calls VCD standard is completely off the mark. They offer a VCD capture mode that captures in a variable bit rate, and only 1.05 bps, which is below and off spec to the actual VCD standard. The result is an extremely low quality capture that has to be ran through a program such as TMPGenc to be corrected and actually usable in order to burn a working VCD disc.
ONLY PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT if you do not intend to archive your old VHS movies or capture anything that might have anti-copy technology such as VHS, DVD, some new Digital Cable broadcast, or from a Sony DSS unit.
Details? Visit www.vcdhelp.com and learn what I've mentioned here and much more.
-Roach
Leave it to Slashdot to review a product I just bought two days ago. Anyway, I want to do my own review on the card, just to let others know of the problems I encountered.
First off, I used to have an original All-In-Wonder card about 5 years ago, and it's still alive and well in my linux server. I loved that card, but 3D sucked until I added a 3dfx card. I ran those for a while, then the GeForce series came out, and I jumped on the ASUS 6600 Deluxe with the TV features. (ATI had me hooked on TV on my computer, so I couldn't live without it.) Well, 2 years later, my ASUS card begins to fail and I started looking at a new card--it came down to the Radeon 8500 or the 7500 AIW cards. Since I don't have a DV camera or any other type device, I figured I'd save the $200 and get the 7500 (after consulting a friend who also recently purchased the card).
I had some problems with the install, mainly with getting the remote and the TV display to work properly. The driver and software installs were actually quite painless (AMD 1.2 GHz, Win2k, just for reference). It turns out that the program for the remote is buried in the application directory, and the shortcut in all the software is wrong. After fixing that, the control worked fine. As for TV, I had no picture, but had sound. It turns out that when you have the TV composite out connected to a VCR, it makes the TV out the primary display, and your monitor is a cloned desktop. Make sure you switch that before you get upset like me that you have no TV display.
Let me say that if you have a TiVo, don't bother getting this card. If you also have a higher end graphics card and do a lot of gaming, don't get this card. However, if you have a GeForce 256 or older card, want decent TV record/playback, and do moderate gaming (with nice effects) then this card is for you. I have had no problems running my 3D games like I did on my GeForce 256 (the 7500 AIW runs like a GeForce 2 MX, so it's adequate for most games). The Guide Plus software (only for windows) allows you to download local channel guides, and set the TV to either watch or record automatically. But as someone else said already, it's dumb and doesn't gather watching habits or anything--not bad though if you just want to record something without being there. I'm still having some problems with recording video (audio and video get out of sync) but I think that's because of the settings I'm using for compression (you can use MPEG-1, MPEG-2, AVI, ATI VCR, or WMF). ATI is aware of the "10 second sync" issue with AVI recording, and are "working to resolve the problem".
In all, I really do like the card, especially the time-shift feature and the remote. I've bordered on saying that I love the card, but the recording issues are the only thing that holds me back.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
You can turn off the autorecord suggestions feature. So you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone could possibly complain about this feature. It uses disk space that is not being used otherwise. So it costs you absolutely nothing to have these programs recorded for you. Even if the TiVo never once managed to select a program that you were remotely interested in, it would still cost you nothing. But if just once, TiVo caught a show that piqued your interest, then the autorecord of suggestions feature will have been worth it.
Because only unused disk space is used for the suggestions feature, it works alot like the Linux buffer cache, where memory that is not being used will keep files buffered in memory. I've also heard people complain about this Linux feature; they think it's wasting memory, and just can't seem to understand that that memory would not have been used anyway. So it either sits there doing absolutely nothing, and is a complete waste, or does something that has a chance, maybe just a slight chance, but a chance nonetheless, of being useful.
TiVo's suggestions feature is not really like MSWord's autocorrect, because it doesn't interfere with your use of the box otherwise. I guess it does interfere a little bit - it makes the Now Showing list longer, which will make it slightly slower to navigate. But really, the effect is so minor, you'd really be splitting hairs to complain about that.
And yeah, I guess you could write your own suggestions program, but it would not be easy. More power to you if you can do it, but it would take alot of work.
BTW, I work for TiVo so please bear that in mind when you read my defense of TiVo features.