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Review: Creative Labs Video Blaster - Digital VCR
"Two weeks ago, I dropped by my Local Frys Electronics to pick up the Creative Labs Video Blaster Digital VCR. I picked up the card for the lovely price of $99. I felt at the time that the days of a PVR was upon me. I hooked it up into my modest system and got started right away. My modest system includes:
- Pentium III 1Ghz System
- 512 MB of PC-133 SDRAM
- 1 40 GB 7200 WD Drive, on ATA-66
- 1 60 GB 7200 Maxtor Drive, on ATA-100
- ATI Radeon VE
- LG 24x CD Burner, on ATA-66
- Running Windows XP Pro
Now, at home, I don't subscribe to any digital video services: I get pretty good reception over an old-fashioned antenna. I primarily wanted the card so I could capture my tape collection of Enterprise episodes to MPEG-2, so I could burn VCDs for my DVD player. I also wanted to begin my trek down the PVR road, and eventually do away with VHS forever.
I spent an evening a couple of days ago, playing with settings on screen-size, capture quality and file sizes. One thing I noticed quite quickly is that the Digital VCR system does not encode directly to MPEG-2. Creative sets up many segment files on your system, each in 32mb blocks, to store your recorded shows and timeshifting buffer. It is essentially a filesystem on top of a filesystem. In order to get the MPEG-2 files out of the Digital VCR, you use a 'File Converter' that they provide in the Creative Menu. The results of this setup is that when you setup the system, you specify how long you want to record (19 hours in my case) and it takes up the appropriate harddrive space (45 GB in my case) for use for future recording. The tool works pretty well overall, even going so far as to create new MPG files every 650 MB. The problem with this is that its possible that your recording could be sliced mid-sentence in your show. The other problem though, didn't occur until last night.
I recorded the episode of Enterprise last night, as well as I had some previous shows of 'Friends' in my 'Saved Shows' menu. After watching the episode again, I pulled up the file convert tool to convert Enterprise to MPG, and flipped onto Live TV, so I could watch the news. Then, the unspeakable happened. Digital VCR froze. I tried to kill it from the Task Manager (which worked perfectly well), but to no avail. There was no killing this app at all. This crash spread like a bad flu across the rest of my system and I was forced to hard reboot. Returning to Windows, I brought up the convert tool to start again, this time not to make the mistake of watching television at the same time. There was only one problem: All of the shows recorded in the last 2 days were wiped out. No data on disk, nothing.
In the end, there were very few positive points that I would give to the Digital VCR product: it just doesn't seem ready for primetime. All in all, the issues I found were as follows:
- Jerky on startup
- Processor Intensive during playing (I'd recommend at least a 1.5 Ghz)
- Menu System is slow
- No Linux Drivers
- Instability in proprietary filesystem
- Mpeg Splitting (what about 700mb CDRs or DVDS)
This reminds me of a homeless guy on local radio who rates movies.
He'll rail on a movie, go on about how it sucks and then give it 50 stars (out of 5)
This thing doesn't even really work and it gets 2.5 out of 5? Sounds like 2.5 out of 10 may have been more appropriate.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
No legitimate publication would do so, there are many questions of conflicts of interest.
Does this reviewer work for a competiter of Creative Labs? Until that is anwered, nobody should take this review too seriously.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
Cause I am sure there will be many that say that is the cause of your problems. ;)
Seriously though, even thought there are bugs to be worked out.....how cool is this technology? Sometimes when you sit back and think about how far we have come (and, for the pessimists) how far we have to go.
It's a good time to be alive, even with all the restrictions that a short-sighted government tries to put on us.
Sent from your iPad.
Honestly, your average consumer doesn't watch TV on his/her computer (not a whole lot watch DVD's on their machines, either. Especially if they own a DVD player for their TV).
TiVo/replayTV makes life easier for the person that comes home, sits in their couch, and flips on the tube (it gives them something THEY want to watch, regardless of time).
This is why TiVo/replayTV is successful, and "computer digital VCR"'s don't.
Not everything is better if you put it on your computer.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I don't see how this is a new revelation... I own an ATI All in Wonder Radeon and it came pre-bundled with digital VCR software in the TV viewer, which would allow one to record from live tv or from a composite/s-video input. It also has the ability to pause live tv and on and on, full screen guide, etc...
And its been our for how long? couple years?
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
DishPVR 501 is a $200 upgrade for existing dish users. While I'm holding out for the 701, An additional $100 for aproduct that works doesn't = pricey in my boat.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Ok, now I guess it is time for the tv industry to complain as much as the music industr has been about copied shows with out commercials.
The flying hamster of DOOM rains coconuts on your pitiful city.
I'll discuss the Windows 9x version, since it is the only version that really worked. The sound had a hissing, broken quality If I used timeshifting feature. It did not record to a known format, but to a special format developed by Asus. An hour at a Tivo-like quality would take over 2GB, which was a problem, because the program wrote only to one file, and the file size was limited to 2GB. I did have fun recording music videos in highest quality and using the included movie editing software to spend several hours turning the proprietary format into mpeg-2, but really, it wasn't worth my time.
I've since bought a TiVo, and it is night-and-day. It was quite easy to add a hard drive for a total of ~34 hours at the highest quality, and the television guide and automatic programming are alone enough to make it much better than any pc recorder without this feature. I only wish it were easy to pull the mpeg-2 streams out of the TiVo and put them on my hard drive.
Get a TiVo!
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Your average PC user will probably spend more time surfing and on chat rooms than watching TV. And even that will be to see DVD movies about surfing the net.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
This looks like a good product but I think I will wait a bit on it. The product in almost the same category (almost because it's also a video card) is the ATI Radeon 7500 All-In-Wonder card. It's 200 bucks and has pretty much the same features, my favorite is the wireless (non-IR) remote. It's 200 bucks but I needed a vid card upgrade so it worked out well.
Here's the review for the 7500: http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q1/020122/
Another card that have been around for a long time is the ATI TV tuner (I have had two version of this) and it's always worked really well, just lately they have introduced the scheduled recording to compete with the TiVo, et al...
Sounds like you have a good start on it. Bravo! Did you actually get it to play in your DVD player, though? You never got that far...
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php
I recently lost the last of my respect for Creative Labs after I tried to install a "Sound Blaster Live" on my new system. Not only could I not get the thing working, but their lame "driver setup tool" (which is apparently the only way to get the drivers) wouldn't even run without crashing or failing horribly. Back in the day, they used to be the main players in the sound card business, but lately it seems like their driver support capabilities haven't evolved since the days of DOS. Even if I had gotten it installed, I probably would have been plagued by the skipping and popping that seems to be characteristic of every new Creative Labs product. Honestly, I'm not surprised at the negative review.
So, it is unreliable in your opinion. We got it...
How about telling us how you would rate it when simply:
It's a $99 piece of junk, but it seems like it can be a cheap tool for certain situations under the right conditions.
If you had this on a dedicated machine, and didn't expect to to be as secure as the National Archive, do you think it could be useful? I do a lot of cool shit on my computer -- and a reboot isn't the end of the world for me. This review leaves more personal experience to be shared for this audience of readers...
________________
All my sig are fjdklafjkldafjkldafdaklf
...and immediately reported a rather signifigant bug in thier file exporter, they still have yet to fix it. The exporter allows you to specify a split size in the options (0==no split), however all sizes above 2GB appear to have an overflow into the sign bit error. This includes thier own DVD-RAM setting (5.2GB). The only driver release since the originals (for Win2k atleast) was to add a digital signature. Another glitch is the occasional too-jumpy-to-watch picture. And it's not consistant enough to blame one thing easily. The startup delay is also extremely long, to the point that I often question if the double click registered.
While the card does have some impressive upsides, don't expect to be able to convert the outputted MPEG2 files, I have yet to successfully convert one to Divx. I did get one to VCD after using TMPEG, MPEGcorrector, and Nero. In the feedback on VCDHELP.com there is some posts in the feedback of what people have gone through to get the files converted. Typically this involves splitting, then remerging the files.
My result? The third tuner card in a row w/o any support and a signifigant need for it. (previously I had an STB and 3DFX card that were bought only months before thier demise)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
You might want to take a look at ShowShifter (www.showshifter.com) its a 3rd party application that supports most video capture/tuner cards. Has a decent interface (though I'm not a fan of purple) especially if you are running the PC from a TV. I have an ATI card and prefer this to the boxed software that came with the card.
This is the reason I can't justify buying one yet. The fact that you are only given fairly small time-shifting windows (until the drive is full), and no ability to space shift / archive information off (VHS? Talk about defeating the whole purpose!) fails to make it attractive. The ability to clip video is also missing.
TiVo seems to do a great job as a consumer toy for today; I don't argue that. I would prefer a computer-based (open-protocol) solution to give myself the flexibility to play with the information, and yes, share information between different locations.
But... it isn't there yet. Is it just copyright fear?
Can you use this thing in conjunction with some other software to bypass the anti-taping measures used such as Macrovision?
~ now you know
By that I mean, whenever you try to force one tool to do all things, you invariably find it coming up short in almost all areas as compared to a collection of specialty tools.
That's what the UNIX approach is all about, little tools that WORK combined intelligently by an intelligent operator to do amazing things. I think tv + tivo + dvd player + cd player + a/v receiver will always seem to work better than a computer which has been taught all of the above tricks. That's because compromises must be made in any product, and as functions are added to products, invariably so are compromises.
Now, when I can do something like "xawtv -ch 122 | pvr --buffer | grep startrek | mkisofs -" then maybe it'll work!
Too bad, sounds like you get what you pay for. The ATI has had the most positive reviews, and even then some people still find it buggy:
. shtml
http://www.hytekcomputer.com/Reviews/ati/8500dv/1
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
ATI has a nice card out, just for capturing tv/video. Built in 125 channel tv-tuner, s-video in, and records direct to mpeg-2 format. This is a PCI card and captures quite nicely. Check it out here: ATI-TV Wonder or, the USB Version or the Cheaper/lighter version and even get a Remote Control for it. All from ATI.
Anyone remember the original Video Blaster from like 1992? Full screen video in windows 3.11, too bad it didn't really do anything else.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
Yet another alternative is the Terapin CD Video Recorder over at Think Geek
I want to get one so bad.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I spent a few years and well over a thousand dollars struggling with this same problem. I finally realized that analog video capture simply does not work.
A key issue with many boards is bandwidth. The general idea is that one hooks the RCA / S-video outputs of your VCR/TV/Camera into the computer, and it does the rest. The problem, for many boards (I don't know about this Creative setup specifically - although it seems to be taxing on the processor, if nothing else) is that this conversion either (a) if done well, takes an enormous amount of resources, or (b) must be done poorly.
The other big problem, and one which seems to be the case here, is compression. For some reason I have never encountered an analog capture board that saves its video in consolidated, lossless files. For my personal work, small, compressed 320x240 files simply do not cut it.
The best way I've found to turn you computer into a digital VCR is to purchase a digital video camera with RCA / S-video inputs. Record your source to the camera and then send it via firewire to your computer. The incoming signal is entirely digital - all your computer has to do is save it to disk. As far as file format goes, there exists a standard DV format (for Windows, at least) that allows lossless compression without the file shenanigans of this Creative board (and most others).
Just my 2 cents.
It sounds like a big piece of junk, but yet, it still gets slashdot time...
Works great, I rarely watch live TV any more, and for me the Creative card has been rock stable under Win2K SP2. I've also had no problems converting files to MPEG-4 formats, though I do have keep the input files under 2GB. YMMV
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
I have a plain Hauppauge Bt848 card. With vcr or mp1e, combined with cron, I record TV programs regularly even with DivX encoding. mp1e doesn't do DivX, but gives you the advantage of being able to play the mpeg while recording it, so you can pause, rewind and fast forward TV...sweet.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
--start--
I bought a Hauppauge WIN-TV PVR (PCI) card for video capture. It has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder with many settings for quality from 2mb/sec to the ridiculously high 12mb/sec with the option of constant or variable bitrate.
After testing I settled on 4mbit/sec VBR which looks great - sometimes it's easy to forget I'm not watching a live broadcast. Importantly it also has a "pause" feature just like a commercial PVR which is great for dealing with the amount of calls I get from clients at all hours. Output to the TV is via S-VHS from an old GeForce 1 card that has TV-out built in. Initially I wanted to use the MPEG decoder card from my DVD kit for output but after testing, the output from the geforce is so close in quality I just use it, plus then I get to use the PC even while it's recording (the hardware encoder means no dropped frames ever).
The box is just a celeron 900 with a half gig of ram running win2k - there is a linux driver available for the Hauppauge on sourceforge but the PC is part of my render farm (I'm a 3D animator by trade) and 3dsmax only runs on windows (for now).
The software that ships with the Hauppauge is, well, shitty. It works fine but the interface sucks, especially when you've used showshifter (www.showshifter.com) though from reading showshifter's forums apparently it will soon support the WintTV PVR board. In the meantime I have simply "frontended" the Hauppage software using scripting in Automate from Unisyn. I've bound all the major features to the cute rubber buttons on the internet keyboard on my coffee table and I've even been able to do things like have the scroll-lock light flash when recording (for when we're not watching TV via the PC). For scheduling I go to the Aussie TV guide at sofcom.com.au to pick out my weeks viewing - the lounge box has winvnc on it so I can program it from my office or even start recording if I see something good and don't have time to run out to the lounge. I use PowerDVD for mpeg playback, mainly cause you can fast forward and rewind using the scroll wheel on the mouse - trez chic
For the future I just ordered a Redrat2 IR controller from www.redrat.co.uk to give the box control over my satellite decoder, and I plan to add functionality like being able to email the box to program it etc.
--end--
Well it's been nearly five months now since I set up my PVR system, a good indication of how it's going is that about two months ago I finally took my VCR out of the TV cabinet and replaced it with the PC. Still using 4mb/sec CBR D1 Pal to record, the end result is indistinguishable from 'live' TV.
My viewing habits have changed; every Sunday I go through the online TV guide and update my record-list (late night shows like Enterprise tend to run at different times some weeks - not that I've been able to sit through a single episode of it yet.), and I almost never watch live TV anymore. Every time I check the /record fileshare there's something new to watch, sometimes I'll hit the weekend and have a week's worth of stuff to sift through at my leasure (mainly simpsons - they show it a LOT here in .au)
I stopped using PowerDVD for playback as for day to day use there were some rough edges that caused annoyance, and reverted to using media player version 6 (I dislike version 7 intensely). A simple alt-enter and it goes full screen, and the spacebar pauses. I've also gotten very good at gaugeing the length of commercial breaks - the show I'm watching goes to commercial I alt enter to get the playback bar and click where I think the break's gonna end - most times these days I'm bang on :-)
The RedRat controller is great, I've yet to find a remote it can't learn, and it's liberating being able to code my own IR app. I'm off VHS for good, no more crappy tapes for me! I've used the Hauppauge to make high quality (6mb/sec) archives of precious VHS tapes such as a friend's wedding and a ten year old recording of a family xmas which had footage of our great grandfather enjoying the day with us just hours before he passed away.
Creative Labs must have bought these Slashvertisments in bulk.
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
I recently set one up using:
- ATI 8500 DV (yes, much more expensive)
- Athlon 650
- 384 Mb RAM
- 2x60 GB drive
- Wireless KB, mouse, remove, 802.11b
I am surprised at his playback problems. The ATI easily plays back anything on my [much more] modest machine. Recording is a slightly diff issue. I can do "good" at about 90% CPU, anything more and the machine cannot keep up.
ATI's "multimedia center" is, IMO, crap in terms of quality and -- in some ways -- features. Really important things like 30-second skip isn't present on playback. It tends to crash with alarming regularity. The on-line guide is nice, though. But you can't schedule anything to be recorded from S-Video (or composite) because of a but which makes it all scheduled programs revert to the tuner, so no digital cable recordings for me. The library function is very marginally useful. The remote has very limited programming for other apps (like WinAmp). It is hooked up to a 53" wide-screen HDTV-capable; the quality is surprising good considering the very demanding display. Dual-head sort of works, but never does the bits you want to (i.e. desktop on one, TV playback on the other) but this is supposed to be "coming".
All-in-all, good hardware, software needs a _lot_ of work. Same old story for ATI. Hopefully someone will come out with much better software; ATI has been working on the mult-media center for years so I don't hold out much hope for it. I would like highly functional software with command-line options so I could script togather the wierd stuff. Is that too much to ask?
First the Nomad, now this. Maybe that April fools "joke" was not a joke afterall.
/.?
How much is Creative paying
I don't watch TV on my computer, but I do however use my computer to copy my DVD's. I can't afford a DVD/RW so I use VCD which is okay for a lot of movies I like - many are older 2 channel films.
I've been very interested in "Digital VCR" lately because I could save my favorite shows. I could care less about file sharing, but I don't have time to watch every show!
I've also considered Cable In The Classroom could be an option because I know two high schools with VCD players [DVD/TV].
What does everyone recommend? I'm using Digital Cable and I could use any platform.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Så länge hjärtat mitt slår, så minns jag dig när,
du stack ett hål i min kevlarsjäl.
Och så blev du mitt sår, och jag blöder ihjäl.
Kom gör ett hår i min kevlar... själ.
I'm shocked, shocked I say, to find that Creative is releasing crappy hardware with buggy drivers.... NOT! So far I've bought from them: a crappy CT7160 DVD decoder that can't letterbox widescreen movies (stretched them to the full height of the TV), a Creative Webcam 3 that never worked right (gave up and threw it out), a Creative Nomad I with slow, unreliable parallel port transfers (no 2000 drivers and don't use it since I got my Rio Volt), and a Soundblaster Live! Value that works fine (don't run XP so buggy XP drivers didn't affect me). I guess 1 out of 4 ain't bad. No more Creative crap for me.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Snapstream rocks. I've been using it for about six months now, and it's a wonderful piece of software. It's not perfect, but it's great, at least for the way I use it. It lets you tape shows using a standard TV tuner (Hauppauge WinTV PCI in my case) and has a great scheduler. I just set stuff and don't worry about it. You can use any bitrate you want. The only bummer is it exports to .wmvs, so you're locked into Media Player, but I'm sure somebody somewhere has a converter out there that will make it a different format if you like. Oh, yeah, it's Windows software, so <asbsetos on> 95% of you should be able to use it.</asbestos>
It's great software. Check it out.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I go to Walmart of all places and get an ATI TV Wonder VE for $47, and plug it into, of all things, my second box with only a K6-500 in it.
After fighting with windows to get all the hw resources sorted out, I get the sw that came with the card working. And it encodes, MPEG2, any quality, DVD, VCD, or any crappy bitrate/vid quality/sound quality/size I define. It does this in realtime. I can't find any avis it leaves around as an intermediary step, and the mpeg file saves and is there instantaneously when I stop recording.
This k6 is very hot when recording, the tv card isnt (well, more than usual), and there's no bloody space on the card for an encoder.
I don't trust using Windows crappy scheduling to record shows, so I switched the tuner to the linux box I'm typing this on.
I WANT, I HAVE TO find a ported version of whatever the heck wonderful realtime (ON A K6!!!) sw encoder ATI licensed for this thing! Picture an mpeg stream at somehting conservative like 176x144 coming off your webserver, with channel and even encoding volume control right in the web page interface...my tv anywhere i want ;p
Thats my plan..
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I'm playing around with dvgrab, transcode (working on a few filters for it, too), etc. You can use divx4 and xvid to make .avi's, and mjpegtool's mpeg2enc and toolame to make VCD's and SVCD's. A very modular approach.
:) )
Note that DV *is* a bit lossy, but it's not too bad, aside from the fact that the color space is a bit odd - 4/1 x/y reduction instead of the 2/2 done in mpeg-2. So encoding a final result with >352 horizontal resolution is subpar in that regard.
When it all works, the dvgrab solution is much smoother than analog ones as the sync is handled by your camcorder or other codec device. The Linux drivers are sometimes flaky though, and you need to have a good set for it all to work.
Now to finally get around to setting up the IR reciever so I can use the cable mouse off my digital cable box... and then automated recording... PVR-land here I come (albeit very expensively
Nope, this is Win2k, and an NTFS drive. What happens is multiple tiny files are created (less than 1MB each).
iirc (this was 4 months ago), at 2047MB ir worked correctly, at 2048 it would not (and upon re-entering the options it would say "-1". At 4095 it would work out to -2047, and 4096 would be back to 0, 4696 would create 600MB files.
I'd have to go home to re-do the experiments to say the effects with 100% certainty. But I am 100% sure that it acted like an overflow error, and not a file size limitation.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
ati has a tv decoder card that does mpeg1,2, and avi (you chose the codec, neat). both the mpegs are done on the card, so all you need to worry about is the speed of your media. I used it on my old tbird 1.2, via chipset on the mb, and it crashed a lot durring recording. I use an intel mb and a 1gig p3, it works great now, no issues at all. It costs 75 or 80 dollars, better than the creative thing.
I wonder if a dual 866Mhz would be better than a mono-processor 1.5Ghz. Might it possibly have avoided the crashing that occurred while processing and watching at the same time?
I would have expected a few "I'd like to see a Beowulf cluster of these" comments.
Their web page states:
Enjoy stunning video and audio performance in TV shows on your PC courtesy of the onboard hardware MPEG-2 recording engine
I don't understand why you'd need a P4 1.5GHz machine to successfully record shows unless something is amiss. I always thought the difference in price between low cost and high cost solutions was hardware vs. software encoding.
Hardware solutions should allow a PII to record shows smoothly.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I was re-vamping a machine that my dad was throwing out and I wanted sound on it, so I bought a Sound Blaster Pci 16 (I figure it's not my main machine) which installed easy but COULDN'T play waves! Nor could it handle midi- it just created incredibly loud static...
So I start a dialogue with their online support people (no phone number ANYWHERE, just 1 e-mail message a day over the course of a week and a half). I told them what I did- they ignored most everything I said, asked me to perform some voodoo ("turn off your computer monitor. Turn it off twice. Keep doing that. Change your video ram cache. See if that fixes your sound") - I ended up running out and buying an SBlive and installing it (and getting it to work) just to prove to them that it was not my system, my card was broken.
Yes thats right. I paid an extra $60 just to prove them wrong. Spite will make you do a lot of things!
I ended up putting the SbLive in my XP mp3/web browser box (all it had was on board audio... maybe this is an improvment?!)
Next time I will hold out for the Echo Mia.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I have a dual monitor setup at home. Sometimes while i'm browsing forums etc I get kind of bored, so I have media player playing a show in a little window kind of out of the way. It's very easy to glance at it when something interesting comes on.
I have a home brew PVR in my apartment (I'll describe it in a later post...) and it quietly captures shows for me. I find my time's a little more efficiently spent. Since I don't edit out the commercials (I usually watch and then delete), I have a few minutes to tidy up my email box or fiddle with Lightwave.
I'll tell you a few totally cool things about this setup:
1.) When the show is being dull etc, I have other ways to pass the time on my computer.
2.) Easy to glance at, no more turning my head. Face it, no matter how close your TV is, you'll have to turn your head.
3.) I can pause/rewind/etc and make sure I don't miss anything that sounded interesting
4.) My TV hasn't been turned on in weeks.
5.) With the extra monitor, the video's never intrusive.
I realize most people would probably be turned off by this idea, but I thought I'd share my epxerience on this topic. I've managed to catch up on a lot of shows I don't normally have time for!
"Derp de derp."
TV tuner cards have been arround for some time, I myself picked up an ATI TV wonder radion card for 25 pounds. Now if this had been DIGITAL, ie it was a DVB card hooked up to cable or satelight (even better if it was a premium pay service) and was directly pulling and recording the digital stream. I might be interested, but this is just capturing TV and then using a computer to process it to mpeg. People have been doing this for years.
All though I have to agree its fun, it however is hardly groundbreaking. Prices have just dropped on TV tuner cards. Just in time for them to go obsolite.
James
It also hasn't crashed on me, so that would at least solve the problem you're having with the Creative Labs software wedging your machine.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Is it free? The ONLY reason I would want to use one of these is because it costs $13/mo for the TV Guide data from Tivo. No one mentioned anything about the guide data.. It isn't a DVR unless it has TV Guide data that updates on a regular basis (for time slot changes etc ..) .. Otherwise this is just a video capture device, something a DVR is not. Two totally seperate devices unrelated.
Can you use this thing in conjunction with some other software to bypass the anti-taping measures used such as Macrovision?
Yes you can. It's lawful in the United States to make video clarifier devices that fix the NTSC conformance issues that a Macrovision signal produces because they have substantial uses other than circumvention of fair-use barriers and thus fall under the exception to 17 USC 1201(a)(2) and (b)(1) because 1. Macrovision isn't "effective access control" but merely copy quality degradation, and 2. the right to prohibit fair use isn't "a right of a copyright holder under this title." Subsection (k) does mention Macrovision specifically but gives blanket exemptions to digital video recorders, professional analog VCRs (while potentially defining "professional" to include consumer-grade VCRs used by professional K-12 teachers), and VCRs that can receive signals over fiber (through a suitably stretched interpretation of "camera lens").
Get a lawyer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Spit and stone, eh? You assume incorrectly that your disgusting Finn tounge cannot be deciphered. Fool.
I thought I'd describe my setup at home.
.WMV format. You can also capture to Divx, etc, but to be honest my best luck has been with MS's software. Don't worry, it's pretty open.
:) Not bad for $150 + finding a use for an old computer.
I have an old P2-400 machine that was basically doing nothing. So I decided to turn it into a PVR. The requirements on the machine are borderline, but it works fine. Here are the specs:
-P2 400
-128 meg of RAM
-8 Gig drive
-Video card with TV out
-Hauppage WinTV PCI card ($99 including IR remote, you can get a cheaper mono version for $49)
- Snapstream PVS ($50, http://www.snapstream.com)
- Windows 2000 (I average about 30 days uptime w/o rebooting.)
-10/100 Ethernet card
Some of you might be turned off at the capture specs, but hear me out. Snapstream captures the video at 320 by 240 @ 30 fps at 330kbits/s. It's compressed in real time using Microsoft's Media Encoder. So the resulting file is in
The picture quality's certainly watchable, but it is noticably artifact'd. My goal was to fit 4 hours to a CD, I could double the data rate and get much nicer quality. The truth is, though, that the only shows I'd want to do that for are Farscape and Deep Space Nine. They are very beautifully filmed and this format does deaden it a bit. (Again, it's very watchable.)
I sometimes watch the videos on the TV in my bedroom via the old video card with TV out. I also send them over the network to my main machine sometimes. It has a dual monitor setup, so I frequently watch the video in a little window on one screen while I'm doing things like e-mail. To tell you the truth, I'm addicted to watching TV this way. I'm able to pause it, zoom past commercials, and even search for stuff about previous episodes.
I'm very happy with this setup. When DVD writables get cheaper, I intend to upgrade the computer so I can get closer to broadcast quality. But I'm not in a huge hurry to do this. Most shows (especially sitcoms) can survive running at really low resolution. Low resolution = low data rate = low CPU Usage = more I can capture and play back. You guys might find it interesting that once I encoded an episode of Quantum Leap at 160 by 100 @ 100kbps at 7fps and played it back on my old Jornada PocketPC. I was pleasantly surprised at how watchable it was, especially considering I was on a flight to LA. I damn near went out and bought a microdrive so I could store more shows on that guy to watch. Heh.
I've been using this machine for over a year now. The biggest change I've noticed is that I don't turn on my big TV very often now. I'm very happy with how it came out.
"Derp de derp."
that's weird... My XP box, which is used for web dev, gaming, and surfing as well as a bit of PERL coding has an uptime of 48 days now without a reboot or crash. It's a homebuilt on a Jetway Board, XP1700, 1gig SDRAM, 2 40GB Maxtor drives, a 24X CDRW, and a 16XDVD. Video is courtesy of a TI4600 from PNY and everthing is hooked up USB. My net connect is lightening fast through my 3Com NIC on cable (Linksys router). I have over 25gigs of installed apps, ranging from ftp servers to UT. Nothing ever crashes, falls apart, BSODs or otherwise coughs up a lung.
OTH, my flameblasted PIII350 RedHat 6.2 box goes down more than a bangcok whore. Everything on board is supported, but after two days of running Apache or an FTP serv (or about 25 minutes of JKII) it overbanks memory and craps out... it has 512MB of good ECC ram to boot!
I guess everything is subjective... but if you are a moron and stuck in your little 'free os' scope of things you won't be able to keep a real OS running (real for home pcs anyway). Maybe previous MS os'es were crap, but not XP Pro. The overhead is worth the stability, and I will take my 169fps in JKII at 1280 res to the bank, thank you very much (not too mention the sweetly short render times in LW)
Hey dudes, I mentioned I'd describe my pvr setup at home, here's a link:
3 75 644
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=31380&cid=3
"Derp de derp."
Damn, the last time I checked was monday :/
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I forgot to mention one of the other benefits of my setup at home: travelling.
When I went to Siggraph last year, I dumped a bunch of shows I hadn't watched yet to my laptop and took off to LA. While I was there, the trade-show just wiped me out every night. I really wasn't up to floating around town looking for something exciting to do. Instead I laid in bed watching shows I *wanted to watch* on my laptop.
That's pretty cool considering that every time I stay in a hotel, there's never anything interesting on TV.
"Derp de derp."
The primary reason that I had written this review was that at the time of writing, I was quite upset at the losses I kept sustaining in the way of recordable streams. After reading the comments by the readers, I wanted to offer some clarifications to my review that were brought up by the readers.
First of all, I can tell you that I'm not in any way affiliated with Creative Labs in any way. I know that this statement could be questionable since I'm still posting as anonymous, but the fact of the matter is, even if I weren't anonymous, I could still be on their payroll. I'll eventually set up an account, but I have yet to find a real reason why.
Second, In my review, I give the card a rating of 2.5 out of 5. A few people had suggested that with my complaints, I should have rated it a 2.5 out of 10. The reason for the 'mediocre rating' was that this device can serve purposes quite well. Recording my episodes of Enterprise off of VHS, it doesn't matter if they system loses the files, as I can always run the attempt again. This seems like a driver issue that could be resolved in the long run, and if so, making it a very nice product.
Third, I am pretty new to video conversion and am still trying to figure out how to decode/edit/encode the movies in MPEG-2. There have been a few articles recently that seem to help with this, and hopefully I'll be able to edit out the commercials in no time.
In closing I realize that the Digital VCR can't quite compare with the dedicated hardware PVRs, and their pretty high cost ($699 for ReplayTV, $200 for TiVO, + $250 for Lifetime Scheduler service). The Digital VCR seems to fill a niche, but doesn't go so far as to making PVR a real reality for those of us who DO watch Television on their PC.
or a linux user. My vote is linux user given the locale here, but I won't rule out the other two. My slowest machine (out of three) is faster than his modest computer (though he has alot more HD capacity than my modest machine does).
... all I can say is that you are all a bunch of couch bound potatoes who find it difficult to even breath due to your poor physical condition and your mouth full of junkfood. You can translate that as you all watch way too much boob tube... go out side, take a walk or ride a bike... hell, try and get laid *rolls eyes*, but do something other than let your ass take root to to the cushions of your couch. You are the reason computer 'geeks' get bad names!
Good picture, nice freezeframes (if I need em), penty of blank tape (partly thanks to my Radio Shack tape demagnetizer), fully programmable, good quality signal...
Perhaps if I didn't have any form of VTR for taping TV and I had waaay too much money...
crazy dynamite monkey
I agree completely with above comment. Why have a converter in first place let alone have it make incompatible mpeg files? I was very disappointed. Not only did I have the same problems but the batteries that came with the card where dead and two weeks later the entire card just died. Creative Labs still made me pay shipping to send it back. They rushed it to market and now they are paying for it.
My system is a HP, Pentium III, .8 GHZ, with CD RW and a very old Hauppage tv-card. I'm a Kung Fu fanatic and I'm working on getting all the episodes on VCD. My experience is to record to vhs and only then get the tv-card involved. The Hauppage drivers lock the computer up on occasion and only a hard-reboot can get things unlocked. Recording from live tv and having the computer lock up results in a whole lot of frustration.
Also, don't use the $$$ programs, I'd recommend using programs such as Virtualdub and TPMPEnc.
Once you get episode X converted into MPEG, then you can rewind the tape and record over it again. And once you get one episode coded up, burn to cd immediately!
AC.
This is why I would switch from TIVO. It costs $13/mo to recieve the TV GUIDE data. A DVR isnt a DVR unless it can download TV GUIDE data on a regular basis unassisted. That's the whole point of them. Otherwise it's just a video capture device. I didn't see a mention of the guide data anywhere on the review .. Anyone??
The only program on windows that has worked consistently for me is Virtualdub. Its more for professional work, so don't expect it to be simple to use. However, like I said, its the only thing I've never had any trouble with, and is the only capture program that consistently produces a stable 29.97fps video file on the incredibly crappy ATI-AIW128Pro.
I have one sitting brand new in the box....why? Because the machine I want to run it on runs windows XP. Their web site has been promising drivers and a "multimedia center" for almost a year now.
And my linux machine....forget it. They can't even get the apps to run in windows, do you think ATI will concentrate on linux at all?
ATI is a joke. They need to fire their software guys and hire some serious developers.
-ted
-ted
They're all Nazis at heart!
Easily records directly to MPEG and MPEG2 (I use MPEG because that way my computer is still very responsive during a recording and I can do things without frame loss) and can easily be made to record to DivX, AVI and other formats. I've done really crazy things like playing a game, such as Unreal Tournament while watching a TV show. (ie, play during commercials then flip back to watch the show, all without problems) I've even watched a previously recorded show with MSMPlayer while recording something else. Creative should have licensed the technology from ATI or someone else with some experience (kinda like they did with their burners) instead of trying to start from scratch.
That sounds great, but doing all those things at the same time with great quality, will put a big strain on the hardware and OS. Do you really want the TV to start to flicker when the kid is playing Quake 5? Or when the garage door opens?
What many forget (or never knew) is that a PVR is recording at least one stream of TV to disk 24/7. That's a pretty big load on a current machine to begin with if you try to do other things with the computer too.
No, these men aren't nazis, Donnie. They're nihilists.
There are an abundance of mp3 players, cars portibles, home audio etc. But what I want is an 802.11b mp3 player for my car so I can program it and upload to it from the computer in my house. Is there such a product on the market yet and are there plans for it in the future?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I use a wintv pvr, and it definately worth noting that their newest drivers allow you to capture as large a file as your filesystem will support, which is damn handy considering that the hardware mpg2 encoder on the wintv pvr supports capturing at up to 12Mb/s.
graspee
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You have all these cards grabbing video at crazy datarates... for 100-200$ (like that MSI geforce3 ti 200 board that I've bought that has svhs in and captures uncompressed), I remember not so long ago when getting a capture system that was doing MJPEG at 1 meg a second (DPS PVR) was costing 20 times that price and the quality was a fraction (not to say, this was the "high end" of what was available on personnal computers).
:)
:)
Today you have a tv tuner, computers fast enough to handle realtime compression of full NTSC@30FPS signal with minimal loss in quality, drives that don't need to be A/V-rated (remember that 7,000$ 4GB baracuda for the flyer?), Bandwidth and storage beyond beleif... god.. some of you here will understand the feeling when I say that the younger crowd here probably didn't have to mess or invest in those expensive equipment, and will never appreciate newer technologies and pricing as much as we do
Anyways, sorry for this little incursion, I think I'll go plug my vidi-24RT back in my amiga 1200
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
.. are msotly unfinished proiduct with drivers that are never updated (in my case- AT TV-wonder- since July 5, 2001) and don't work with future systems. I won't even start describing the problems I have under linux. You experience may not be so bad, but I recommend investigating the product you are buying, starting with checking for the latest driver update and reading the bug list (proprietary software is one issue with some cards so quite possibly the manufacturer-supplied drivers/PVR program is what you are going to use). And don't forget to read reviews- at least a couple, on independednt sites.
The price is incredible, but what's even more incredible is that the card is very high quality. It has Coax, S-Video, and RGB inputs, plus an audio loopback to connect to your soundcard. The PVR software that comes with it is very good if you don't need advanced features. It records directly to MPEG-2, although the recording quality is not customizable enough for my tastes.
I personally wanted software that would record to MPEG-1 with custom bitrate settings so I could then use VirtualDub to convert my recordings to DivX. I bought a copy of InterVideo WinDVR for $99.95, and I'm extremely happy with the combination. WinDVR is extremely customizable, letting me choose between MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats, as well as giving me a ton of bitrate, audio, resolution, and other options. I highly recommend WinDVR as well.
Based on the review of Creative's card, I wouldn't go anywhere near it. It sounds like a horribly-designed product, and I think the AVerTV Stereo + WinDVR is a much better solution that can be had for about $150
I've tooled around with this stuff for a few years now. Most setups that I've seen have been pretty hit and miss in terms of stability. Basic recording is usually ok, but advanced features and the interfaces are usually pretty clunky. They spend a lot of time slaping togther the features and pinning them to a skinned interface but these things just don't have that slick cool interface you get when things work intuitively.
I currently use an AverTvFm setup on a p3-800 for capturing mpeg-i+ii and it does a decent job. Comes with a remote and fm tuner for about $90us. I can pipe the output thru my video card to tv. It suffers from a caveman UI.
I'd love to be able to capture to DIVX directly (but can't, yet..if I ever get off my arse I might roll my own program one day.)
I recently purchased an ATI AIW 7500 to go along with my Athlon XP 1900 and at first I was feeling bad. A hardware encoder that goes straight to MPEG 2? I was kind of pissed, becauset the ATI was only software. Well, I feel a little better now. The Ati supports more formats, does dual displays and plays games pretty well.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
ATI has had MPEG2 hardware co-processors as part of every video chipset since the Rage128. Apple doesn't take advantage of it but ATI's tweaked version of Cinemaster does to great effect. Unfortunately unlike standards-based MPEG2 cards like the Hollywood+ ATI plays their hardware drivers very close to their collective vests. They won't even release a binary for Linux for their hardware acceleration libraries, the fsckers.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I have one of those boards. It has a builtin MPEG2 encoder. I use it in an Athlon XP1600+ with a Matrox G400 video card and a 5400rpm Maxtor. I configured the G400 dual-head card in 'clone' mode, the second head is connected to my TV through SVHS for the playback. Note the creative didn't work for me with a Geforce2-MX
The board comes with a remote. The PVR software remembers the location where you were while watching a recording, so you can flip between recordings and live TV and it will continue where you left. You can set the MPEG2 bit-rate at any level up to 8mbits. For my 27" TV, 2-3mbit is good enough for most of my recordings.
When watching time-shifted TV (=recording and playing back simultaneously), it consumes 40% CPU on my box when I set the display size to either fullscreen or 640x480, and approx 25% CPU when I set the display size to 320x240. When I record a program while the PVR software is on 'standby' (not watching), the CPU usage is below 5%.
I've been told by other users that when you share the mpg drive on a local network, then a second box without the videoblaster card, but with the PVR software loaded can be used to watch recorded shows too, independent from what you're doing on the first box.
The three things I'm missing are an interactive TV guide, a direct SVHS output, and a Linux version of the software, or otherwise at least a Linux version of a driver for the card. As soon as they integrate at least the TV guide I'd say the board is worth the $100. but until then, I'd say it's a nice and promising toy, but not yet worth what they're asking.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
If I was able to manually find and edit out the above post so that I could view the entire page, including -1 comments (except for that particular one) without having to spread it out horizontally over 57 monitors, why can't Slashdot come up with an automated way to detect and fix these "page widening" posts?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Not only that, but I've gone through 2 Creative CD-RW's (both died just after warranty) and 3 Creative DVD-RAM drives (under warranty). Worse still is my mate, who has toasted an amazing 3 Creative CD-RW's. Their stuff, especially lately, is crap. My SB Live! Platinum (got for $20 a year ago) is the only thing I've ever gotten from them that works (I'm also not affected by the WinXp problem--I run 2K and FreeBSD on that box). Simply amazing.
I sing the doggie electric!
Ingredients: Corn, Partially Hydrogenated Canola and/or Sunflower Oil, Whole Wheat, Rice Flour, Oat Flour, Sugar, Maltodextrin, Salt, Cheddar Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Whey, Ass, Buttermilk Solids, Romano Cheese From Cow's Milk (Cultured Pasteurized Part Skim Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Whey Protien Concentrate, Estrogen, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil, Onion Powder, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Disodium Phosphate, Autolyzed Yeast, Citric Acid, Hydrolyzed Wheat Gluten, Garlic Powder, Lactic Acid, Artificial Colors (Including Yellow 6), Disodium Inosinate, and Disodium Guanylate.
Surprise -- nobody wants to sell PVRs.
All three retailers are heavily promoting UltimateTV, which works only with DirectTV.
In the end, I gave up: there is so much uncertainty, and I could not actually "try" any of the products in the store.
Did Microsoft actually discontinue all manufacturing of UltimateTV? Will Microsoft's manufacturer-partners (RCA and Sony) actually build more UltimateTV boxes? Will ReplayTV survive its decision to offer "video sharing" on its overpriced hardware? Will TiVo survive its failure to deliver commercial-skipping or skip-forward features? Will these devices all become boat anchors by Christmas?
I'm putting my money back in the bank, and maybe I'll buy another $69 VCR instead.