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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."
Will you be able to see pixel for pixel high res?
It seems to me that this shouldnt be to difficult, technically speaking, considering the 1080 pixel resolution is well within that normally supported on a PC monitor.
....mmmmm...Hi-Def TV....yummy!
I cant wait to get Hi-Def on my TV, have seen it before and it is the ultimate in geek-drool fest!
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
From this article it looks like the HDTV All-In-Wonder card won't have any useful video input sockets on the card and there's no mention of any external connector box.
:(
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. I wish someone would do a card with component or SCART inputs.
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.
Unfortunately there is not much information of what the card can do.
Does it have an MPEG hardware decoder for HDTV, or is it only a tuner and demodulator?
Does it have TV out or can it only display on the monitor?
If the card is only a tuner and demodulator with PCI bridge then it's no big deal. The CPU will have to do all the decoding, maybe with a little help from the graphics card. You can do that with a lot of DVB-S,C,T cards already. With a 60Euro card you could already watch the Superbowl in HDTV, of course you needed a fast CPU.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
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...
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!
Sure if you want to run windows...
I want My HD MythTV...
If it doesn't work with linux, then I don't give a shit one way or the other.
And like most of the All-in-Wonder cards, I doubt half the features will work correctly if at all.
Otherwise I would give up my ancient geforce2 card in a second, but for right now I have no reason to. My 19 inch monitor with my ATI wonder VE tv capture card works great for me right now.
Oh, BTW I use the Nintendo Game cube via the composite input on my ATI card. If you want to play games and get a useable picture get a decent program, like TVTIME. Most tv capture programs for windows that I've seen in stores looks like crap on a monitor, get something that does anti-aliasing properly. Thank god for Free software.
isn't this...it's a hdtv input card that can take component inputs.
Most HDTV uptake will come from HDTV over cable, with the decoding/descrambling done by the cable company box, which produces component outputs.
Then our MythTV boxes will be able to record HDTV!
Pretty soon all this hardware will be worthless, since nothing will be recordable except your home movies.
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
Couldn't find it earlier, but see also this page: http://www.twinhan.com/visiontv.htm for existing TV tuner cards that support hdtv including support for cable, satellite, and scrambled sources.
Unfortunately, these don't do 3d like the ATI. =)
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
There have been PCI HDTV cards for years that receive OTA HD. Even a cheap one that only works in Linux!
As much as I hate to rain on your Linux zealot parade, you do realize that TVTime uses the *DLLS* from dScaler, a Windows program, to provide the deinterlacing, right? Just because it's for Windows doesn't mean it's awful.
-matt
have you tried pushing your monitor that hard? Best i can make an (admitedly slightly older) G500 21" do is 2000x1500 @ 77Hz; any higher and the pixels distort. What your graphics card can drive it at, without strange effects, is a different question as well: with a matrox g400 i use 10px fonts and stare at this screen all day long; with a nvidia card 12px fonts and 1600x1200 made my eyes melt.
In that case why bother mentioning the operating system at all? The oringal post was giving the impression that tvtime did something on linux that was not possible on windows. That is not true. dScaler was doing it on windows first, and a lot of other projects use dScaler to handle deinterlacing. And with good cause, dScaler is an amazing program, if you have the CPU power to throw at it.
-matt
Why is this card better than something like Hauppauge's WinTV-HD? At least the Hauppauge has component outputs standard. I'm guessing it's the price as the Hauppauge isn't cheap. BTW, there's a few more HDTV cards available at places like The Digital Connection.
There are already a number of cards available which can receive ATSC HDTV broadcasts (which require an additional antenna) in addition to analog cable and broadcast. The nice step up here is the use of their own NXT2004 chip, which provides a QAM demodulator.
I've been looking for years now for a tuner card which will allow me to watch Time Warner's Digital Cable here in Tampa. Step one is getting a demodulator which can sync to the QAM-256 signal. Tne next big hurdle is determining if my cable provider uses a proprietary mechanism on top of that to encapsulate their streams. There are no standards here as far as I can find, just commonly used implementations.
A cable comes into my apartment with 50+ digital channels, including the networks in HDTV. I've got a cable box that decodes it without having to put up an aerial... why can't I have a card in my computer that does the same thing? This card could end up being just another useless ATSC tuner card.
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.
Nobody's probably going to see this since I posted it so late, but this was brought up at our last LUG meeting -- it's a PCI HD TV card made especially for Linux. All the drivers are open-source, etc, etc. Check it out: http://www.pchdtv.com/
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
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.
In Europe, mostly the DVB-Standard is used to transmit digital TV.
;-)
DVB-S over Satellite,
DVB-C over Cable,
DVB-T for terrestrial reception.
All three variations of the DVB-Standard can also transmit High Definition video, e.g. there is an HD channel broadcasting via the Astra satellite system on 19.2East called Euro1080 http://www.euro1080.tv.
Some cable networks use proprietary encryption, but the basic transmission usually occurs via DVB in MPEG.
In Australia, HDTV is available over DVB-T terrestrially.
I don't know about the exact situation in Italy, but DVB-T has been rolled out extensively in the UK and I heard also in Scandinavia. Rollout has started in Germany with Berlin, some trials exist in Austria.
Regarding this card:
No, it will not be able to receive European digital broadcasts, as it uses the American ATSC Standard that uses other modulation, even though also MPEG2 is broadcast.
But there are DVB-T PCI cards available, they cost just a bit more than the cheap DVB-S cards (starting at EUR 60) - around EUR 90, but they also do not have a hardware MPEG decoder chip on board but offload that to the CPU or graphics card like the card mentioned here.
Digital-TV in Europe is mostly driven by the Pay-TV companies in each country with the UK and France having the most successful adoption rate - no wonder as old analog terrestrial TV offered only 4-5 channels of stuff people did not want to see (not implying that the now 500 channels piping out lots of crap are better qualitywise
Best regards
jjj