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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)
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
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.
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?
I watch tv on my computer on the 17" monitor. I get to see the edges of the display hidden usually by overscan (big wooo!), and the sound system on my computer is better (SB Live! + multi-speakers + bass) than the built-in speakers in the TV downstairs.
/. while inane CNN or say Enterprise plays in a corner.
:)
I also get the benefit of browsing say
Of course, there's a TV next to the computer in case the computer crashes, or watching video independent of the computer.
Does it count if it's a TiVO connected by s-video to the video-in of the ASUS v7700 Deluxe?
This way, I can crash my computer all I want, and still watch/digitize any video I like by VCR/TiVO/divx.
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."
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."
Oh, yeah... Thanks for the reminder on reliability. I forgot that I had to get the unit replaced about a week after I first got it. It was getting it's brains all scrambled, and needing to be rebooted about once a day. The current unit has been working pretty well, considering the power here is not the cleanest, (My pwrchute logs on the linux machine are full of brownouts and overvoltages), and so the 501 has been rebooted a couple times in the last year.
My buddy has to reboot his TiVO about that often, (~2/yr) so I guess it is a symptom of these things just being computers after all.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!