Slashdot Mirror
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)
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."
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...
http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php
...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
One of the main differences is that the Creative Video Blaster Digital Digital VCR encodes via a hardware MPG2 encoder chip while the ATI AIW uses pure software to do the encoding. That means much less processer overhead for the DVCR while encoding. The DVCR also has the ability to pause live tv, etc...
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
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...
It is quite possible to pull MPEG-2 streams off a TiVo and put them on your PC's hard drive.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's not Slashvertisments. It's talking points. Slashdot has a series of talking points. PVR, 802.11, VoIP, .NET, and Personal Privacy are at the forefront at the moment. It what they feel everyone is talking about and they support their agenda. Yes Slashdot has an agenda (listen to some of the GiS archives). And for the most part, they're right. Any WELL-written article in these points will get posted.
Although I personally would like more VoIP and Anime they have to keep to what they think their audience wants.
Besides, how many Creative Labs banners have you seen on Slashdot?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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.
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.
True dat. Nvidia owns it up because they have rocksolid (and universal drivers) for their product line. ATI has hacked together pieces of crap that won't function worth beans. Does anyone remember when the first ATI Rage 128 came out? And the "disappearing toolbar" bug, along with the "disappearing icons" bug? Those were great. And now we have to deal with the bugs of the multimedia center. (which I still cannot get to capture at 720x480, even on my 2.2GHz P4 and RAID0 drives)
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
well actually its LIRC withe an RCA 4 device remote ($5 at RS)
i set LIRC to do certain things when i press a button on the remote.
Girder is the windows equiv for it.
check out www.monkeygadget.com for building an IR reciever ($5 or so in parts)
www.lirc.org for linux software
and girder.nl for windows software
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
I looked at building my own DVR, but nothing comes close to TiVo and ReplayTV. I finally gave up and bought a ReplayTV. It's changed my life. I can't believe I didn't buy one sooner. I never watch live TV anymore.
Yes, I do watch TV on my computer. The Replay is in the living room, but I've run a cable from there to the office and I watch TV in a little window more often than I watch it in the living room.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Couldn't agree more:
;)
- It's anonymous (for Christ sake!)
- Superficial: CPU load at encoding to MPEG ? Support for other video formats ? Bundled software (e.g. DVD player) ? etc, etc...
All in all, don't confuse "luser stories" with "reviews".
Ah, and one last thingie: here you have a proper review of two video cards with Digital VCR, time-shifting, remote control, (etc, etc) capabilities (namely "ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 DV" and "VisionTek Xtasy Everything") . Alternatively, do yourself a favor and look for other reviews for ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 8500 DV card ("tom's hardare" and "tech-report" had two pretty good ones, IIRC)
Oh, yes, I'm looking forward to be modded down to "-1 flamebait"
This card does have hardware MPEG-2 encoding (an NEC IC), unlike the other two you mention. Therefore, the CPU load is very low, ~5 on a 1ghz Athlon -- AFAIK the other two both use LSI's software encoder, the fastest software encoder available but still painful at around 60% CPU on the same box.
There is no hardware decoder, so CPU use is dependent on your video card's acceleration features (iDCT, Motion Compensation) -- expect about the same overhead as a software DVD player.
It doesn't store the data in standard MPEG format, and the conversion tool is very slow.
If you could get raw MPEG out of it and there were Linux drivers, it would kick ass. The effort to make Linux drivers for it isn't very mature:
http://www.760mp.com/videoblaster/
The standard excuse is that they don't want the support burden. But that's bogus; they obviously have no obligation to provide support to any party other than the company they sell the chips to. In particular, the IC vendor does NOT generally have any obligation to support the end purchaser of a product containing their chip, or to someone trying to write their own drivers.
The other excuse I've sometimes heard is that they don't want other companies to clone their product. But that's a red herring. There are literally millions of transistors in these chips; just having the information on the programming interface to the chip (registers and commands) doesn't magically make it easy to design a compatible chip. If that were true, everyone and his brother would be making Pentium IVs, since the programming interface for that is well documented. As it is, there is only ONE company successfully competing with Intel on high-end x86 processors.
IMNSHO, these companies are just stupid to have such policies. If a company selling even a halfway-decent MPEG-2 encoder chip would make the programming specs available, there would be Linux support in no time, and it would sell more chips.
I've actually spoken to sales reps at three different manufacturers of MPEG-2 chips, and none of them are willing to provide docs except under NDA after you buy a very expensive SDK. And that might not be so bad, except that they won't sell the SDK to just anyone who is willing to pay. They'll only sell them to companies that they are convinced will buy tens of thousands of their chips.
One of the MPEG-2 encoder vendors does have a Linux driver as part of their SDK. Their chip is used on the Hauppauge board, and so Hauppauge has the right to distribute the Linux driver (in binary form only), but refuses to do so.
If the MPEG-2 encoder vendors wanted to support Linux, they could offer to sell the SDK (or just the documentation) to anyone who will sign a contract acknowledging that the vendor would not provide any support and that the SDK is provided on an AS-IS basis.
It almost seems like these companies believe that it's a good idea to support the Microsoft monopoly.
</rant>