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Uncompressed TV Video Over USB 2.0 from ATI
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wanted to watch TV on your notebook computer? Well, you used to be stuck with an external TV tuner that will usually compress the video so much to squeeze it down the USB interface, that it's not worth watching. But the new ATI TV Wonder manages to push uncompressed video down the USB 2.0 interface, producing superb image quality. It also comes with ATI's suite of multimedia applications and utilities. The reviewer reckons it's a great unit, although a little bit on the expensive side."
*Sighs for some dupe checking*
Easy.
VideoLAN
"Broadcast" from your server with TV tuner as source, watch anywhere on your LAN.
It works well. VideoLAN+server full of TV and DVD rips = my very own Video on Demand system that blows the doors off of what Comcast offers.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The EyeTV boxes do in fact have TV tuners. The EyeTV 200 is a FireWire based PVR-like device for Mac. (It's about $300, though).
Broadcasters are only obligated to switch to ATSC when 80% of the local population are actually able to obtain ATSC signals. That means, that 80% of the local population will actually need HDTV tuners and monitors in place.
That is a LONG way off for most of the US.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Maybe it's not 24-bit color.
"Full resolution" is meaningless when you talk about an analog signal, too.
ATi's TV Wonders in the past have considered 320x240 to be "full resolution", and anything higher was scaled up (video captures) or interpolated (still captures) from that.
I don't know if it natively captures any higher now, but 320x240x16 at 24 fps isn't unreasonable.
ATi used to really shine at all this cross-media stuff, nowadays they're teh suck. TV-Out quality on my 9800 is absolutely awful compared to a cheap GeForce 5200, for instance.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... want uncompressed signal so they can do more than dumb stuff like record TV and play it back.
Some people, like myself, want uncompressed video so we can load it into a editor, chop out all the commercials, and encode it with DivX or Ogg Theora or something else. Or write it out to a DVD. Now they don't have to Fast Forward through the commercials.
Here's another thing some people like to do. Hook up their VCR to the capture card, put in some old VHS tapes, and start recording. Then they can edit it, arrange the clips, and write it back to a DVD so it doesn't get degraded. The Macintosh is amazingly good at this sort of thing, particularly with DV cameras (if you don't have one, use a Formac Studio TVR).
Anyway, you can't do any of these things with MPEG, because most editors don't do MPEG editing. Final Cut Pro and Premiere don't even do it (I've tried with v3 and v6 respectively). Why? Because it's lossy!
Uncompressed, non-lossy video is good, particularly in open formats. Just because it doesn't suit your application doesn't make it any less cool.