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HDTV On Your PC - ATi's HDTV Wonder
Spinnerbait writes "ATi is getting their new High Def capable HDTV Wonder ready for release soon and there is a preview of the card over at HotHardware. It will be an add-in PCI card that will be bundled with their All In Wonder cards initially and eventually be sold as a stand alone product. High Def on a nice 23" Flat Panel... time to drool."
With all these stories about HDTV and big screens and wotnot, I felt inspired to hook up my TV to my computer. I have a 50-inch plasma tv, and surround sound with a hefty woofer, and - apart from the movie experience - how cool would UT2004 be on that!
Well anyway This site [ramelectronics.net] has some useful information about wot the holes at the back of ure TV do, and various other stuff.
It sounds like you likely have a misconception as to what 1080i is exactly.
1080i is 1920x1080, 30 frames/sec, 60 fields/sec interlaced.
Methinks this is still quite high for a PC monitor. Not to feel bad, though, because very few HDTVs can resolve every pixel of 1080i either.
720p (1280x720, 60 fps non-interlaced) is a better match for 95+% of PC monitors, and is still very pleasing.
As with DVD they will probably change the standard or remove and add some crappy copy protection. So if you buy stuff now you will regret within a short while...
Both of my flatmates allready have HDTV cards for watching TV. One of them is even running it with Linux (Nebula Digi-TV).
If they made a movie of your life, would anybody buy a ticket?
I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture.
With an inexpensive BT8xxx card and a decent linux box, you can use tvtime to watch beautifully scaled and deinterlaced video in realtime. I use it with my gamecube and it's absolutely fantastic!
You need a monitor with a scart input or a games console with a monitor output. Don't try putting a PC in the middle.
Pretty soon all this hardware will be worthless, since nothing will be recordable except your home movies.
It appears that this card is a ATSC tuner/demod (U.S. HDTV transmission standard). It likely passes the digital stream over the PCI bus to the video card (minimum 9600) for decoding and displaying.
It likely does not have TV out of the card itself but you can probably use an ATI video card that has composite/svid out to display on a SDTV. The quality of the scaling is yet to be seen. Likewise, SDTV streams (tt has a standard NTSC tuner also) will likely be scaled to HDTV resolutions. Again, quality of the scaling is yet to be seen.
The real question is how good is the ATSC tuner/demod. This has been the biggest stumbling block to comprehensive and consistent reception. The digital cliff can be very steep.
I've been hooking up my game consoles to my monitor through my PC for years, and I've NEVER seen any kind of lag like you're describing. I'm not using anything fancy either - just an old PCI WinTV card and xawtv and now the awesome tvtime.
I game, therefore I am...
There's little-to-no HDTV over here. The only place I've seen it in fact is in post-production studios, where they'll use it as a master-format.... Pity :-(
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Notice that there is no slot for inserting a flash card; unless it supports an external flash drive connected to the PC via USB or similar (doubtful) this means you will not be able to watch the majority of cable hdtv channels, since they are usually scrambled and require a flash card with the decryption information in the cable box.
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
This user is unfortunately thinking of using an mpeg-2 encoding board like a Hauppauge PVR-250 where there is indeed a lag. Boards like the ATI HDTV however just have direct analog and digital stream recording without any realtime encoding, so there's no lag here.
The older AiW cards 8500 and up, have a very good deinterlacer and scaler built in to them already. The card will definately be able to scale to HDTV resolution, as any bt8x8 tv capture card can do that with any video card made in the last 10 years.
Just a guess, but this will look absolutely great, especially if you have a monitor which can display 1920x1080.
-matt
You already can... it's called the Linux pcHDTV card. And no one will ever be able to make a card or other recording device with component inputs due to the copyright issues.
No they won't. No consumer pc on the market can handle recording an HDTV stream. Assuming a 4:2:2 image (12 bits per pixel) you're looking at almost 90MB/s of data. No hard drive can handle a datarate of anything near that. And the only hardware MPEG2 encoders that can handle HDTV are still way above what any consumer can afford. Honestly, I doubt you could even send that stream to your video card over the PCI bus. I think you'd either need the inputs to be right on the video card, or use a special, dedicated high bandwith bus from the capture card to your video card. And even then you would have no chance to process the signal at all, so all of your deinterlacing would have to be done on the video card.
I'm sure someday we'll be able to, but just look how long it took before we could digitally record SDTV. We need a lot more than a capture hard with HDTV capable component inputs.
-matt
Sorry about that 4:2:2 is 16 bits per pixel I believe, not 12, 4:2:0 (IIRC) is 12. So my earlier figure of just under 120MB/s would be right.
-matt
Yes and no:
1920x1080 interlaced is what you get. But due to nature of the MPEG-2 encoding they probably use 4:2:2 which means only the luminance channel has full resolution.
I have one of ATI's older graphics cards (the first or second generation of their "All in Wonder" line) - but the latest version of their software.
And it is buggy, still. Their drivers are much better now, but in the begining they were dreadful.
I'm still quite pleased with my setup - in a one room apartment the TV/computer combination saves a lot of space, and I can surf the net during commercials. In spite of the problems, I recommend buying one to anyone who asks. However, every three days or so ATIMMC (the process that actually plays the TV) forces me to do a hard reset.
A lot of the problem is with win32, of course, which enters a non-responsive state when I try to kill the ATIMMC process (I don't do any actual work in a windows environment so my technical knowledge is somewhat limited - but if it walks like a kernel panic, and if it quacks like a kernel panic...). If I were still running win16 I would hardly notice something that took three whole days to crash my computer.
Also - the early versions of their product hardly ever worked in beige boxen. It was wildly incomptabible with a large spectrum of commodity hardware (I've been told their newer cards have this problem to a lesser extent.) I mention this because I went through a lot of grief over it - but now adays building your own machine isn't worth the $50 you save anyway.
So - while I'm really pleased with their product in spite of the flaws - I wouldn't recommend being a beta tester for the HDTV card, especially given the slow rollout of HDTV. Give ATI a year or two to iron out the flaws, and let HDTV acquire a little penetration, before bothering to buy. That's what I plan to do.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
http://www.usbhdtv.com/ is a better choice.
I have not tried it myself, but you should be able to use the pcHDTV card. It's an HDTV card designed specifically for linux. It won't solve the cable-box problem, but it does support the OTA broadcasts.
It has been supported to some degree in MythTV since October (v0.12), and with continued updates since then (v0.13, v0.14).
There is no "standalone" HD Tivo with component inputs for the technical reasons described in the grandparent post.
Yes, OTA HDTV cards work under Myth. Again the key is working with the compressed data.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
So, probably more like 150 MB/s (less for the US / Japan since they use 1080 lines). Now, MPEG-2 might get you 10-fold compression or better, but that requires a hardware codec.
Jon.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong.. But the website says:
Complete Multifunction Tuning:
* HDTV WONDER will function as both a HDTV tuner and an analog tuner
I agree.. I think CRTs still have a much better picture. It seems that LCD's just don't have that small dot pitch yet like CRT's do.
What is the situation in Europe about digital TV transmission? I've heard in Italy there is a thing called 'digitale terrestre', is this card capable of receving such a signal?
ATI is by no means the first to produce a card like this. There has been a PCI HDTV card on
the market for over a year, produced by DVICO. Unlike most cards on the market, that keep the
HDTV stream off the bus, and overlay the video directly onto the vga signal and you don't get to
capture it at all, This card dumps the raw mpeg2 out to you. It will tune over the air HDTV as well
as the HDTV you will get on cable.
The Fusion III just came out last week, I think. It has the hardware capabilities of tuning that holy
grail cable QAM 256, as well as over the air. And you get to play with the raw hdtv data,
and process it however.
www.dvico.com - manufacturer
www.copperbox.com - retailer
Erm, that's assuming no compression. HDTV is broadcast using MPEG-2 compression (specifically designed with broadcast media in mind), and the US ATSC standard specifies two data rates of 19.4 for broadcast and 38.8 for cable applications. The more often used broadcast rate is well within the capability of modern hard drives and the higher cable rate should be doable by high end drives as well.
Not exactly...
In most areas, the digital TV stations are on the less used UHF band of the spectrum. UHF antennas are relatively small.
One of the most popular HDTV antennas is the tiny Silver Sensor. It's resold by Zenith and Terk at Sears, Best Buy, etc.
The last estimate I saw for HD availability was that around 95% of US citizens were able to receive HDTV. I receive no less than 20 digital tv broadcasts where I live. Even my parents, out in the middle of nowhere, receive 6 - including all the majors.
You need 5C enabled firewire ports and software to capture transport streams... thats not included in your standard PCI firewire card.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The original post was talking about component input for HD signals from a cable box. Component HD is uncompressed analog. You'd need a chip to recompress it to do anything useful with it. You probably could display it, but your system would be useless for just about anything else.
-matt