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ATi HDTV Tuner For The PC Arrives
Chi-Energy writes "ATi has released their new HDTV Tuner card for the PC today, which allows
High Def broadcasts and cable content to be displayed on any PC monitor. It should be
is especially impressive on some of the new fast response time flat panels that
are on the market today.
HotHardware has a full review and showcase of the product here. The
good news is, with the supplied antenna, you can just grab local HDTV
programming right out of the air for free!"
FWIW...
Extreme Tech HDTV review (7 out of 10)
*shrug*
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Here's all the dirt on HDTV. Read and enjoy :)
uh actually, unless I misread the review... currently you have to use an ati product adjacent to the hdtv tv wonder...
they'll be adding generic gul in later driver software revisions... supposedly...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we int he real world actually USE
1) Buy this card.
2) Buy IR mouse.
3) Watch HDTV from satellite or cable
4) Profit
We'll need some good software, first. It should only be a matter of time before Myth or one of the others gets good support for this.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we in the real world actually USE (cable and sattelite)<snip>
That is what you get. The ATI comes with a tuner that not only supports OTA but also QAM so you can plug your local cable company's line into the card and get a signal. Now, that doesn't get you the encrypted stuff (ESPNHD, HBO), you will need a box for that, but will get you locals. That is the case for Cox Cable here in Omaha, NE.
AT BEST, with your HDTV OTA card you will get marginal quality from a handful of HDTV channels.
What are you talking about? If you compare the same content delivered over the air to that delievered via cable, it is all the same digital signal, not marginal quality. End of story. Now, reception of that signal might not be great, but if you do get a lock of about 60% or greater, it is the same. Again, this is my experience here in Omaha.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
"Anyone know how much space a show recorder in HDTV actually takes up? I'd be curious.."
I read 19 megabits/s somewhere...
"Derp de derp."
So does Anandtech.
Anandtech review
It's right around 8GB per hour, which is about 4x the space that SD requires.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Several TV shows in HDTV have been available on BitTorrent for a while now...er, or so I've heard anyway. Encoded with Divx, they take about 350 megs per 1 hour show minus the commercials, and are pretty good quality.
I read Usenet for the articles.
...no other expensive software required. Another reason why I love my Mac.
Here you're just wrong -- OTA signals are often BETTER than via cable because cable companies can compress their QAM signal as much as they'd like. OTA requires the diginal feed to use the full 19.2mb/s stream, so as long as they're not multicasting you're often getting a better-quality feed.
Also, most cable boxes use a component (YPrPb) connection whereas computer-based HD OTA tuners use RGB, and RGB is a noticably better signal. So if you're able to actually receive the HD signals (not too hard in my experience), OTA can often look better than cable.
That said, I do agree that it's nice to finally have a QAM-capable card so that it's easier to actually record content using cable.
As expected, there are no Linux drivers, and it will probably be a while before they can be made. In the meantime, pcHDTV makes a similar card with open source Linux drivers. Unfortunately, that card has no Windows drivers and can only receive broadcast signals.
You mean like the ones that various TV-rip groups have been releasing at least for about a year and a half now?
A quick search at NFOrce Entertainment returns this as the first "officially" released HDTV rip (unless my search was horribly flawed, which is quite possible), but it seems that onwards from December 2002 the HDTV rips gradually became commonplace.
Anyway, old news :-).
If you are serious about receiving over-the-air DTV transmissions and don't have an external antenna, you will want this: The Silver Sensor directional antenna. It is the standard in use by broadcaster labs for in-building reception. You should get a long length of coax so you can point the thing out your window, sometimes you need to get a reflection off of a neighboring building if you are not line-of-sight from the transmitter. Keep poking it around until you get a usable signal.
There are a few different modes of HDTV, the two most comming being 720x480 progressive (30 full frames per second), and 1920x1080 interlaced (60 half frames per second)
AntennaWeb does a great job giving you HDTV reception information. Antennas Direct has a great selection of antennae (antennas?) to choose from and some useful information on which frequency ranges each antenna is useful for.
Support of ATIs hardware has nothing to do with Myth and everything to do with drivers. The All in Wonder line of cards is universally accepted as the crappiest line of caputre devices ever made even on Linux.
As long as they have proper Linux drivers, which since it's ATI it will not, it'll work fine.
dctrecord
I've been researching chipsets for digital TV. Here are my links to current hardware products:
STMicroelectronics System on Chip (2) Get Linux here
ATI Xilleon 220 (Products)
Sigma Designs Digital Media Processors (Products)
IBM PowerPC405 STBxx (Zarlink [2], Araneo)
Texas Instruments DM642 DSP (i3 Mood Box , X-Designs Flikit + Softier MediaLinux)
NEC EMMArchitecture2 (Galaxis + LinuxTV , PRISMIQ + Linux)
Equator Technologies BSP-15 boards
Via CN400 (Mini-ITX Board), PM800 and PM880 (w/ HDTV for Pentium 4) , ShowShifter HMN, Soyo Multimedia Ready Motherboard (with TV Tuner, $129.99)
Toshiba TX System RISC (MontaVista Linux)
Windows chipsets:
Intel 815 VisionPlus terrestrial box (Korean OEM)
AMD Geode (CoCom)
ARM (Samsung, etc.)
Digeo X-Stream (Paul Allen company)
The flag rule doesn't take effect until July 1 2005. When it does, devices that receive digital TV signals must look for and "give effect" to the flag. "Give effect" means to only output over approved connectors and only allow copies to approved recording methods. The FCC is currently in the process of approving these methods but have stated that copies will be allowed. Copies encrypted and bound to one device (a la TiVo) and outputs to analog outputs are explicitly allowed in the rules.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&t hreadid=207262&highlight=wintvhd
avsforum is great for home theater pc
I still dont trust ATI. I just bought a 9000 PRO AIW after some good reviews. All their drivers are WHQL certified now. So at least standard video / multiple out stuff dosent cause crashes. But the Tv-on-demand software causes 100% cpu utilization on a 2ghz p4, and often crashes. I saw a whole forum/poll for snapstream where people were buying the Hauppauge 250 or 350 to replace various ATI AIW cards. Like 90% were very happy with the switch (well they just use the AIW as a video card)
You can use anything with firewire that can record DV. Even a PC with linux would do.
I HAVE TO GET THAT. I'm such a moron. Thanks FCC!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The reason is that when compressing video, doubling the resolution does not double the file size, in fact it only increases it marginally. (For good codecs anyway. mpeg2 aka svcd, and mpeg1 aka vcd, are not. mpeg4 AKA xvid AKA divx are.)
And since the source signal is very clean and free of hard-to-compress artifacts, and because it's very clean and the next frame is very similar to the previous frame so very little has to be encoded just the difference, you get stellar compression.
You end up with a picture that is far far better then anything you can get using analog - even cable. And it's 350MB for 42 minutes of video.
I much prefer to download all my tv shows since they look so much better then cable, but my upload is limited and since with bittorrent you have to upload everything you download, I don't have the bandwidth (yet) to download everything. But I download whenever I miss a show for example, or if two shows are on at the same time. And half hour comedies since they are pretty small.
To get you started here are two links:
#tvtorrents - web site
#BT - web site
Well, all you need is a Mac running OS X and the Firewire SDK from Apple's Developer site. HDTV boxes do come with Firewire connections. Read more here
Most HDTV broadcasts are nothing more than scaled up versions of standard NTSC footage. (
m not talking about your HDTV line doubling)
I'm talking about the taping of actual shows in HDTV.
Most shows that do film in HDTV... They have 1 HDTV camera at best, while the rest are standard NTSC cameras that have their signal scaled up to meet the HDTV standard res. Then they simply claim it as "HDTV" When it is not. Most shows dont even have the HD cameras or editing equiptment. They simply scale it up before sending out the HDTV signal.
The cost for HDTV is too much for even major broadcasters to justify with the small number of HDTV viewers.
DTV's signal has become more and more compressed as they add channels. I recently looked at my fathers DTV signal and thought it looked like Reel Video. It was really bad. Its just so compressed so that they can fit their channels in their limited bandwidth.
Cablevision here claims Digital IO (100$ a month) is HDTV digital cable. When the truth is less than 10 channels are HD. And again you have the problem of shows simply just SCALING UP existing shows, or even NEW shows, claiming their HDTV when they're not.
HDTV is not worth it yet. Its over priced and the cable companies are out of their fucking mind price wise.
This is a great thread on how to get it working.