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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.
and an IR Remote that will work from another room with no line of sight.
Great! I hate having to have line of sight when I'm trying to watch some TV.
So does ATI release Free drivers unlike the NVIDIA hell I've been stuck with the last 2 years?
I wish it were easier to turn down hardware on the same issues we can turn down software, but it seems to be a sellers' market.
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.
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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.
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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)
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They probably mean a giant chemical laser which in case of no line of sight just makes it. :)
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...
The Radeon 8500 is leaps and bounds better than the 7500, even in AiW form. THe 7500 is actually based on the Old radeon chip, but with a 0.15 micron build process that allows higher clock speeds. As for the DV, i assumed that the DV was the way that they distinguished the standard 8500 from the AiW. I.E, I thought that the all-in-wonder WAS the DV. If you are looking for performance Difference between the 8500 AiW and the 7500 AiW, I have to say that the difference is quite large. The 8500 AiW is better than the geforce 3 series in my opinion, and with all the features, a perfect all round card :).
If anyone can indeed clarify the DV thingy, I also would like to be put right...
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.
The mpeg-2 it produces is horrible too. It works fine with it's own video player, but using any other codec and it's "squashed" so I only record in VCD quality (mpeg-1). Even that is horrible. If I bring it into a video editing program like Cyberlink's PowerDirector, the audio and video slowly get out of sync. From what I can tell by doing google searches, it's because Hauappauge encodes some sort of proprietary sync markers into their a/v streams and other vendor mpeg editing tools don't grok it.
They did finally release an mpeg editing tool that just allows "cuts only" to edit out commercials, but it then re-encodes the entire file. I bought PowerDirector mainly because it doesn't re-encode the entire file and now it's all but useless to me.
So, in summary, their competitor isn't much better, if at all. The A/V capture market sucks it seems..
Wake up ATI and smell the Aqua!
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I used to have an all-in-wonder ATI card. Now I have a geforce and a separate winTV card. Here's my problem with it: When it's time to upgrade your 3d, you have to upgrade the whole thing. I do a fair amount of gaming, mostly sports and action, and while my old Geforce 2mx is great, I'm sure in a year or two I'll want to upgrade. By having the card separate, I don't have to worry. There is software (shapeshifter, below) that works as a "tivo like" thing.
That said, I'm thinking of building a dedicated "media server" box for my stereo. I have the old AIW pro laying around to use as a card, get a wireless keyboard and mouse and network it. Anyone else done this and have any advice (note: Don't bother with Linux advice. I'll run Win2k.)
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The All In Wonder 7500 Does great MPEG capture. It does MPEG 2 encoding and decoding on the card, so not only will it capture, but it helps you watch a DVD while doing all sorts of other things. The bottleneck here is your harddrive speed, you'll drop frames if the drive can't take all the data. But a modern IDE drive should do the trick.
As far as dual head goes, the main reason it doesn't have "normal" dual head (Analog and DVI outs) is a space issue, if you take a look at the back of the card, it's full with what it has (Analog inputs from CATV, Input for breakout box, outputs to breakout cable). However, it does allow you to run a TV and a monitor at once, so you can watch a movie on a tv with the thing and still surf on your monitor, if that's your bag.
Anyways, I have an AIW7500 as well, and I can say I'm much less dissatisfied than the grandparent.
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So, I haven't been able to find out anywhere, does this card handle PAL to NTSC transfers (like a region 2 PAL disk to an NTSC TV), or would a body need more hardware than this?
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I argued this out with my quake friends - what use is producing more fps than your monitor can handle?
they went on about mouse responseiveness
no I dont understand either
All I can think of is 2x oversampling to reduce aliasing in 150hz monitors
tbh I can discern a 1 field error (even subtle things) in the animated moveis I used to make and that would be 50hz (2 fields per frame and PAL @ 25 fps) so I very much doubt that 50fps is the upper bound of noticability. I was aware that even when I pointed the anomalies out people around me couldnt see them until I slowed it down or picked out the single frame. I think one becomes tuned to such devices. Ask a musician and a layperson to disect sound and you'll see what I mean.
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I can't believe /. decided to post this story - do I smell payola???
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The eye can only see fifty FPS of FILM, as film includes motion blur and the like, foolying your eyes into seeing many more virutal frames. Standard example: Take a camera that films at 2 frames per second. Film something passing from extreme left to extreme right over the space of a second; you'll get a blurred image of it passing. Now, write a 3d engine that will render at 2 frames per second. Have a 3d object pass from left to right over the space of a second. You'll get a static image of the object at one side of the screen for half a second, then a static image of the object on the other side of the screen for half a second. Looks much different, nicht wahr?
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While the list you give you TV recording and playback, it's nowhere even vaguely close to TiVo-like.
Read what he (and others used to TiVo) asked for, and you'll note you didn't answer the question.
First off, the hardware solution given is very, very low quality. The recording is MPEG-1 IIRC, and low-bitrate at that. The playback is fixed resolution (so if you have a big-screen HD-ready TV, you've screwed yourself -- flipside is that TiVo is pure NTSC as well, so it doesn't exactly do wonders for bigscreen HD-ready either).
Second, the real contention is not the hardware, but the software. Pausing live TV is not an optional feature. 2+ weeks of guide data is not an option. Automagic recording of a show instead of punching in day/time data is not an option.
Ok, so maybe those features ARE an option to you or to others who haven't used TiVo, but it merely means that your solution is behind the times. And yes, all of these things are harder than they seem. And yet, people whine about having to pay TiVo for exactly this kind of thing.
All that said, your solution does work, and is a low-budget alternative to the AIW card, TiVo, Replay, etc. It does lack some features, but what can you expect for something that is half the cost (or less)? I just wanted to note that you didn't actually answer the question being asked.
very affordable All In Wonder product .... For a mere $200 smackers
Am I the only one that thinks $200 is a lot of money still?
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I don't want to upgrade my OS from Win98SE so I am 'stuck' with going to a 7500. The 8500 looks nice but I have so much legacy hardware that I would lose all of it just to gain better video.
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I think the theory behind a 150 frame per second Quake score is, "If it can get 150 normally it should be able to get the acceptable 30-50 that seems smooth to us all in the "harder" parts." Remember some of these games vary wildly in complexity depending on the level, area, number of characters on screen, so getting 150 kps assures you that it won't start to suck as the battle gets complex.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
i notice a tremendouns difference playing tuxracer when it's getting 200 fps and 500 fps. usually the 200 fps is because there's some massive compilation going on in the background and it's jumpy. 900 fps is smooth, and nice. real nice.
Really...?
But...does the Linux OpenGL driver support cube map, vertex shaders, hardware skinning...using standard or ATI extensions?
When you put a GeForce3 on a Linux box, you can use it as a GeForce3. But last time I looked at it, when you put a Radeon on a Linux box, you can only use it as a very very fast Rage 128.
Looks like a waste of money to me.
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.
An original SGI R5k Indy, with a 2GB scsi hdd and 128mb ram can be had on ebay for around $100 right now...
Of course, it won't run windows, but it'll do anything you want to a bit of video.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Agreed.
Why is it that everyone who comes out with hardware with some kind of video recording ability, they tout it as "tivo functionality"? I'm not a big fan of how some companies abuse trademark law, but if I were tivo, I'd crack down on this misleading nonsense.
Just because you have hardware that records MPEGs, doesn't mean you have anything even remotely close to what tivo and tivo-like systems provide.
And to answer your question about if there are any good alternative software out there that "more or less" makes something of a decent tivo clone, I don't know of any. There are bits and pieces here and there that record and playback video, set up timed tasks, and I believe, even read program guide information, but AFAIK there is no freely downloadable software that does everything and has a nice interface.
Can you tell that I recently upgraded the drivers for my AIW 128 Pro card? After about 2 minutes in Ghost Recon, it would lock up. I tried a couple of times to unsuccessfully revert back to the old drivers. An email to ATI support went into a black hole. I finally got the new drivers to uninstall properly (I think), and the old ones installed, but the game still locks up occasionally. Damn ATI and their shitty drivers. I didn't have ANY problems for a whole year with the original drivers. I got the card for the ability to watch TV on the PC, and get some old video tapes to digital format. It was OK for that, but I would be very leery of buying another ATI card.
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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.
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Not only is it cheaper, but both multimedia and 3d functionality of the card works under linux. With the 8500DV, there is no accelerated 3D support. I don't think the released version of GATOS has the right PCI IDs, but I get the impression that in CVS it is supported great.
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What is the best "plug it in and it just works" card?
psxndc
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There's a very simple reason for that: one receiver means one channel. With DVB digital television, one receiver could theoretically mean multiple channels from one multiplex, as it depends on the capabilities of demux (and decoder(s) and so on), not the actual receiver front end.
Now, You're not going to get multiple receivers on a single TV/Video card for some time, as each receiver takes real estate on the board. You can see how much just by looking at the card: the receiver is the part enclosed within the metal cover. It's perhaps about 40*80mm (1.75"*3.5").
What I really would like is pure receiver + demux cards for DVB-(T/C/S) reception. Cards which I could just tell the tuning parameters and request specific PIDs as separate streams. That way a small piece of software could just receive a single channel and store it on disk for each card, without any recompression (end result would be whatever was in the air/cable/sat - mostly SDTV 3-7Mbps CBR MPEG2 streams, perhaps some additional meta-data). If I wanted to watch something while storing, just have a second process read the (constantly growing) file on disk.
So, I don't know anything about TV cards. At all. But I bought a super-cheap version a while ago at a surplus store for $25. I don't really watch cable television, but I wanted an easy way to plug my video game consoles into my computer, instead of leaving a television on my desk just for video games.
The issue is, the screen shakes a tiny bit all the time. You get dizzy if you play mario for more than an hour at a time (which has become a sort of built-in self-restraint.) Now, the reason I'm getting shitty performance is that I bought a shitty card. I understand that. But is there some hardware specs that would have clued me into that fact? Besides the price tag?
I'm happy to shell out more for a better card, but I'd like to be able to point to SOMETHING in the specs and say "That's what I'm paying for."
Besides the extra 0 in the price tag.
Actually, folks, you have me to thank for the release of this product.
:-)
This lower cost unit most certainly wouldn't have been releas6ed if I hadn't just purchased the top of the line Radeon for more than twice that
Regardless, I like the unit, and the Tivo-like functions (and great remote) are well worth it.
You're all quite welcome. Go enjoy the price break.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
One of my main problems is that I can't get the tuner of the card I have to work. I think I just got a bum card, it's a wintv hauppage bt878 or whatever... tried 2.2 kernel at first awhile back, and now the 2.4 kernel, and still no worky. Well, I can view tv via a video input via the rca->svhs dongle (source from vcr), but the cable tuner doesn't work. Or maybe it's just my cable? I have no idea, whatever, it's pissing me off.
:)
Are there any special drivers I should be using other than the kernel drivers? Any special insmod params?
I suppose I'm going to just have to buy another card so I can use the tuner, but I've been kinda soured by the wintv card that I have now, and fear if I buy another card, the new one won't work either. Unfortunately, my current card way over a year old so there's no way I can take it back...
Originally I thought it was my dumb self not being able to get it to work under linux, but after a year of trying off and on, I think it must be the card, but it still could be me I guess. Any help would be much appreciated.
I'd really love to get this sucker working. I've been kinda looking for a new software project to work on, and emulating tivo like functionality under linux is definitely something that's needed, although I don't know if I have what it takes to write it, it never hurt anyone to try.
This morning the story said it came with an IR remote, hence my past. Now it says it comes with a remote.
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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.
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Or even a layperson musician and a member of the clergy who isn't a musician.
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I agree, traded mine for an Nvidia Personal Cinima. The ATI drivers were constantly locking up during recording and even just sitting idle. The Personal Cinima is far from a perfect PVR solution, but the fact that I can leave my media computer on for months instead of just days now is more thn enough of a plus...
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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.
In addition, you could have the fastest video card in the universe, but considering that a monitor refreshing at 80hz will only display 80 frames/sec, its a moot point.
Besides, standard NTSC television runs at 30 fps, and PAL (Europe) runs at 25. From what I've read, the minimum acceptable fps for most games lies right around 25 for flight sims, 35 for shooters.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
I have gotten dualhead working on my 7500. Xinerama and DRI aren't doable, and aren't likely to be doable till someone first implements a xinerama aware version of software Mesa. Non-xinerama and DRI are also not doable (though that will hopefully be fixed).
Anyway, drop me an e-mail at tonenili@comcast.net and I'll pass along my XF86Config-4 file.
Dinivin
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And what could be more geeky than a device that turns your computer into a PVR?
Oh yeah, and if it does freeze up you have to follow the necessary hard reboot (unplug/plugin) with an immediate soft reboot. Otherwise it freezes up again in about 20 minutes.
There's every indication that this is due to an incomplete software download. It's a well-known bug, but Tivo is in denial. They prefer to blame defective hard disks, customers who use splitters, and cable companies that fiddle with the vido signals. I've heard reports that the fix is the same as the cause: a software upgrade. Alas, Tivo no longer does these every few months. Can't imagine why!
Wish I'd gotten a ReplayTV.
At the risk of seeming to totally lack a sense of humor, I have to point out that some folks don't have their computers and TV sets in the same room.