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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."
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.
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).