Review: Creative Labs Video Blaster - Digital VCR

An anonymous reader sent in a review of Creative's Digital VCR, a TV tuner card supposedly offering functionality similar to a Tivo or ReplayTV dedicated box. From the review, it seems like there are still a few bugs to be worked out.

"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

My Maxtor Drive was a new purchase that was going to be dedicated to my Digital VCR Experience, hence my marooning the drive on my onboard HighPoint HPT370 controller card. The installation of the card was a snap, and the drivers were quick and painless.

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)

In the end, I'd give this product a 2.5 out of a possible 5 score. The unit has a lot of potential, but it seems far from it. Dedicated PVR equipment seems a much better choice, even if pricey."

Comments

anonymous reviews

[Pave Low]

this site really shouldn't be publishing anonymous reviews with no byline.

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.

Re:anonymous reviews

[frinsore]

Everyone could have an alterier motive. That news caster that was on the local news saying that apples are healthy could have owned an apple farm. Or maybe the producer does. They don't have to say that they gain profit from people buying apples. I agree that they should, but then there are so many people involved in publications that it would be difficult to poll every employee to see if they have a conection with every story.

You need to judge every piece of information to see if it has bias, not just the ones where you don't know the source but the ones where you do know the source but don't have a reason to trust the source.

I think the review was by some random person that just picked up the card. The review implies that he enjoys the card but has some problems with it. Which basically describes every piece of software I've ever installed, whether it be closed or open sourced. He's not promoting a competing product, in fact he's almost promoting the product with a disclaimer that it won't work perfectly and that he found a nasty bug. He doesn't work for creative (he pointed out a nasty bug) and he doesn't work for a competitor (he actually enjoys the card).

Just because you can attach a name to someone doesn't mean they're not anyless a stranger then an anonymous.

too bad you are running XP on it...

[Em Emalb]

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.

Do you watch TV on your Computer?

[FortKnox]

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.

Re:Do you watch TV on your Computer?

[Zathrus]

I could care less about watching TV at my computer. But if you follow trends in the Home Theater market you'd know that, right now, you can put together a $1500 computer that does virtually everything that a $30000 line multiplier, a $1000 DVD player, a $1000 MP3 jukebox, and large bits of what a $4000 preamp can do.

Plus you can play games, have a CD catalog, full X10 control, and quite a bit else which is either difficult or expensive to do with a traditional home theater setup.

Within a few months to a year you'll be able to do all of the above, plus 100% of a pre-amp, a PVR, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.

Replacing $40k+ of equipment with a $1500 box is what the old idea of convergence is all about. Not to mention that you're replacing 3-5 separate components with one, and that one is more configurable and expandable than the original components were.

So what's missing? Well, there are some really good sound cards out there now (check AVS Forum for info), but I don't think they do all the latest sound formats, particularly the 7.1 or 8.1 ones. There's a big gap in user friendliness, ease of setup (and that's considering how intricate a lot of high-end AV gear is to setup too), and stability. And there's still no replacement for a stand-alone PVR - although it's getting closer and closer.

That said, I will continue to shake my head sadly at people who refuse to buy a TiVo/Replay because they either think it's too expensive ("$10/month? That's absurd!") or are worried about it being around in X amount of time. To the former I say - if you can build it for cheaper, do it. Thusfar nobody has. There's a reason you're paying for the service, it's because nobody else can provide it. To the latter, well, this _is_ the future of television. In this time of hard to get VC, both companies are still getting it. And, worst comes to worst, if they fold then the data needed to make the unit functional (guide data) is available from other sources. (I don't agree with not paying for service as long as TiVo exists, because then you're just looking for a free lunch and not paying for services rendered -- but I also think not getting the lifetime service is rather silly).

Doesnt the ATI AIW do this?

[sniepre]

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?

My experience with a home-built PVR

[Billy Bo Bob]

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?

Re:Asus Digital VCR

[cscx]

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.

Funny you should mention that since it really makes me wonder about this Creative "filesystem on top of a filesystem" implementation... NTFS supports file sizes in the terabyte-range unlike FAT, so I wonder if this is all done in a way to allow backwards compatibility with FAT. I'm sorry, but for the requirements the article specifies/recommends, you'd think this person would be runnning Windows 2000 or XP anyway. It's kinda analogous to instead of having swap partition(s) in Linux, you just create normal paritions and dd a bunch of swapfiles onto them. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

Not really digital is it!

[oolon]

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