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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 :)
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.....
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.
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.
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)
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
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