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Uncompressed TV Video Over USB 2.0 from ATI

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the want-to-build-a-mythtv-box dept.

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."

1 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Not Great by Jozer99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.