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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!"
Let's hope they have done sufficient testing on the drivers. A couple years ago, I purchased an All-In-Wonder Radeon. I nearly slit my throat trying to get it to work with my fancy new-at-the-time Soyo motherboard.
It drives me nuts that people keep spending R&D money on Over-the-air tuner cards for HDTV. THere are plenty of these out there, and they all stink.
What we NEED, and I mean REALLY NEED, is the ability to get HDTV from sources we int he real world actually USE (cable and sattelite) into our boxes. Right now there is no way to do this without an insanely expensive Component encoder card.
AT BEST, with your HDTV OTA card you will get marginal quality from a handful of HDTV channels. With satellite or cable you will get dozens of absolutely pure channels - and you can't get them into your PVR.
GRrrrr.
- it is crapped by some stupid user interface some marketing guy or even a nerd at ATI though was really cool, but makes the viewer application look like a boombox on steroids.
What I'd like to see is an HDTV PCI card that just works under Linux. I know there is pcHDTV, which ATI's model is competing with, but there are no Linux HDTV cards that can do over the air, cable and satellite HDTV. When that comes out I will buy it in a second.
The story and review reads like this is the first HDTV tuner card for the PC - ever. There are already quite a few, and in fact for $199 this is substandard to the Dvico Fusion III Gold QAM, which was released not to long ago.
:(
This card allows you to intercept QAM modulated HDTV (in addition to 8VSB), which is what you get over cable TV. Regardless of what people say, if you can't literally see the transmitter from your location you are going to need some sort of antenna hardware above and beyond bunny ears, amplified indoor antenna's help - but not that much. Several stations actually protested the 8VSB standard because they understood that very few people were just going to be able to recieve a good signal with just indoor antennas.
With this card I simply plug into my cable, and most of my local HDTV channels are there at 100% signal. Also for the few stations that come in reliably OTA and I can easily switch inputs via software.
Also some representatives of this company have said that they are willing to aid in producing linux drivers, although I have been trying to get some specs and have not heard anything back recently
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
That excuse is years out of date.
If $400 is cost prohibitive, then you shouldn't have such a nice TV. Heck, $400 only buys you 6-9 months of crummy cable TV.
I'm sorry, those shows may have been recorded from HDTV input, but there is positively no way that full resolution HDTV content with 5.1 sound can be compressed down to 350 Mb/hour no matter what codec you use.