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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."
My PowerBook and I would love this! Finally something to make use of those USB 2.0 ports. With FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, I haven't had a need to buy any gear that makes use of anything faster than USB 1.1.
Plus using my existing laptop as a tuner+PVR would be awesome!
this one has the better write-up, though. let's pretend the original story doesn't exist, and keep this one.
You know, using uncompressed video over USB just uses lots of bandwidth and processor power, both to encode the signal in software for PVR, and to control the USB bus. Sometimes a good MPEG2 codec can look great AND be used for PVR purposes without sending your P4 or Athalon XP to 100% usage and filling up your RAM and diskspace with gigantic uncompressed video. I had a card that used uncompressed video, and one with hardware compression, trust me, there is no compairison in terms of performace. My dream would be a USB tuner with a decent and flexable encoder chip, so that I could stream video as MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX or XviD.
The user "reckons"? That implies he's never seen the product.
Minor nitpick.
Anyways, how would this thing perform as an input source for a PVR?
I'd ask about linux support too, but, ATi, USB 2.0.. That's two strikes already.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I would of thought it would be better performing since its throughput is higher and sustainable plus isn;t processor dependent, those exact things USB 2 hasn't got. If its price then surely there isn't that much difference and just plain wrong if there is a superior connectivity standard out there?
Jonathanjk.com
The TV tuner in the TV Wonder USB 2.0 looks to be an NTSC style tuner, compatible with cable TV and some over-the-air signals ... but if we believe what the FCC tells us, NTSC will be completely phased out shortly for ATSC. And more and more cable companies are moving to a QAM-encoded MPEG stream too.
So, doesn't that sort of severely limit the lifetime of this product?
When you see hardware like this, you might think "heck, why do people pay in the thousands for video capture cards with effects that can be done with current processors?" the answers are:
Remember the video IN of your graphics cards with "VIVO"? with some you can do uncompressed streams, but why does it look amazingly ugly sometimes? noisy etc..
The main difference between let's say a consumer card like this ATI and high-end card not only lies in price and bundled software, but also by the selection of components and the electrical design of the signal sampling portion of the board. Some will have basic filtering and signal conditioning (what I suspect from ATI) and others will have higher quality components, more signal conditioning features, better bandcut filters to limit noise, etc..
While this is a nice way to have good video quality for an inexpensive rate, I'd keep my miro DC30+ board rather than replacing it with that, given ATI's track record with hardware and drivers, I wouldn't count on that hardware to work well outside ATI's bundled software, which is probably *very* newbie.
Nevertheless, the good thing is this will force better companies to make similar specs at the same price breakpoint, end users and midrange users are the winners.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'm waiting for TV via Wifi. Oh wait, I guess TV already is wireless.
I know this was intended to be a joke, but the advantage to using a digital streaming protocol for video over wireless is that you can at least in principle handle signal degradation and dropouts a lot better than you can with plain old analog TV. I know _I_ got tired of doing the "wave the rabbit ears around until it looks almost-decent" thing.
their support staff said to "check that my video driver was current", and I eventually gave up and got a refund.
Speaking of drivers, its too bad this thing is from ATI because it means the drivers will blow. I've already been burned a couple times by ATI cards with their POS drivers. One card I got had a TV tuner, but for that card ATI -never- managed to release a fully functional driver on Windows, much less anything else. When I called in to tech support for help, their proposed solution was to reformat the drive, reinstall windows, and try the crappy drivers again... yeah, thanks for nothing... only a year or so later did I manage to pull it out of the bottom of a box and get it semi-functional under linux using the xawtv stuff (which frankly says something about ATI's incompetence in that the only drivers that ever worked were written by a 3rd party on an OS they don't support). For specialty stuff like this drivers are everything, and I have no faith in ATI when it comes to that (esp under linux).
Unless you are doing professional video editing, and possibly not even then, you don't need uncompressed video. What you do need is video compressed without interframe compression, using a codec such as MJPEG or Pixlet. Ideally, the codec you use should use the same per-frame compression technique that your final product will use (DCT if you are planning on producing MPEG1/2 content) so that your production encoder only needs to do the interframe encoding, and there is no transcoding loss on your key frames.
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