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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."
"Ever wanted to watch TV on your notebook computer?"
No. I get too much tv shoved in my face in restraunts, coffee houses, gas stations, and walking down the sidewalk as it is.
My ThinkPad A31p has video inputs.
Of course, to actually WATCH the TV input, you need software. Contrary to popular belief, Cyberlink PowerVCR is teh sux0r, and no amount of fidgeting was ever able to get it to synchronize the signal correctly; their support staff said to "check that my video driver was current", and I eventually gave up and got a refund. Capturix Video Suite worked fine, though.
The GATOS and related projects which were once working on this seem to have silently disintegrated without touching XF86 4.4.x, although it could be that there's some kind of support and I just have no clue where to find documentation. But... No external dongle, and it's a laptop with video in.
Not to say it's COMMON, mind you, but it does exist.
(The A31p was the Best Laptop Ever, and I wish IBM would sell something at least COMPARABLE to it, but nothing in their current lineup can match the three-spindle monster machine. Curious tidbit: Although it's not in the official specs, an A31p can have 2GB of memory!)
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is this, TV only or is it Cable as well. Potential problem, even if it has cable capabilities is that cable companies are moving towards all digital, where you must use thier boxes. However, presently (at least in MD) you can still get the old signal. FREE (don't tell Comcast), if you have broadband
When you're playing around with headless servers it would be really handy just to have the actual screen available. Once the machine is booted, there is always SSH but sometimes it doesn't get that far.
A nice little window on the desktop containing the USB-connected machine, ala VMWare/VNC.
Actually, I did run across a HDTV USB2.0 tuner but I don't know much about it.
This sounds pretty cool, but you still need to be tethered to a video cable. What I'd like to do is receive the tv on my desktop and be able to broadcast it via wifi to my laptop. I've done it before using the nullsoft streaming server, but it's a bit clumsy as I can't change channels. Is anyone aware of such a solution that would allow you to watch tv via wifi and change channels?
As far as devices, my personal preference is a Canopus ADVC-100 connected to the output from a VCR. YMMV of course.
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I still have a TV with screw-downs for VHF and UHF antennas.
Not being cable-ready didn't shorten it's lifetime.
When we switch to ATSC, plug your tuner box into the TV Wonder.
If that's a problem for you, buy ATi's HDTV Wonder.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
With the added bonus that it lets you import straight to iMovie, FCP, and any other DV based video editors.
Apple also supply HackTV for free which lets you watch DV streams without doing anything to them. They also supply Quicktime Streaming Server for free which lets you take this stream and broadcast it over wifi/internet/satellite/etc in real time.
The flip side of these DV boxes is that it specifically isn't a TV rec'ver, but rather just a converter for composite signal(so you need a vcr or tv with composite out to convert your cable/antenna/whatever into composite video or s-video).
Before you say, oh no i can't carry be truly mobile. The idea of watching TV portably with the ATI device is useless anyway as it already relies on a powerbrick, so the difference to the end user is minimal between using either device. (You still get pegged to a power socket somewhere.)
Plus the reality is most people will just use it in their home.
Everybody can debate whether they really want to watch TV on the computer or not. Everybody can debate whether usb 2 or firewire is better. But there are more important things that people are ignoring.
I don't care about watching TV, but if this has support for capturing to any AVI format, it should be an amazing cheap video capture device. PCI cards based on the bt878 or phillips chips seem to be flaky at times, and when you use these, the audio and video aren't recorded on the same clock. You've got the video capture card and your sound card running basically completely independent of each other. With this, the signal will be digitized before your PC even sees it. It will eliminate a lot of screwiness as far as audio sync is concerned. This puts it well ahead of most (simpler consumer oriented) PCI based setups.
As far as how it compares to products like the Canopus boxes that take an analog signal and convert it to a standard firewire DV signal, while these boxes offer pro quality analog to digital conversion, and no audio screwiness like the consumer PCI cards, they ONLY support DV. People, DV is not "full quality." 4:1:1 sampled video has VERY noticable artifacts because the color info is only recorded once for every four times the luminance is recorded. This makes scenes with highly saturated color and sharp lines have painful JAGGED (because its digital) edges to the color.
On top of that, 3.4MB per second is just not enough for repeated processing without generational loss. The reason you can edit DV on the computer with no loss is because, in most video editing programs, you're only recompressing the effects, not the stretches of unmodified video. However, if you actually tried compressing a clip to DV a few times, you'll notice the mosquito noise gets noticably worse every time. An external capture device that supports uncompressed video allows you to bypass this completely by recording in formats such as a very lightly compressed mjpeg (I tend to go for about 3:1 compression. DV is 6:1) or better yet, when the quality really has to be perfect, Huffyuv which is lossless. In this way, I can avoid the 4:1:1 sampling artifacts for full color resolution, and no loss in video quality while i'm processing it for noise reduction and whatnot.
Now, whether device actually does what I expect it to is a different story, but I for one will certainly buy one of these to try it out. After all, the worst that can happen is it doesn't support what i'd like it to and I can just return it/sell it on ebay.
But I don't see a COAX OUT connector. Man, if I could get a system that has a COAX out (along with the other 2) then I could actually find it usable. No TV in the hotels I have stayed in (other than maybe the Hilton) have a monitor with anything BUT a COAX.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Will Firewire be commonly available in 5 years? If you were designing an industrial product which needed to be viable at least that long, and you need the elegance and peer-to-peer nature of Firewire, would it be a safe choice?
First, Hauppage has a USB2 capture device out as well and judging from past experience that card will be much more stable, compatible, and reasonably priced.
ATI's capture drivers and software are generally pretty crappy and, although they seem to use standard hardware, they jack it up enough to be slightly incompatible with generic drivers and software. Many programs had special hacks just for ATI cards and I imagine it'll be quite a while before this device integrates smoothly.
On a seperate note, what the hell took so long. The USB capture cards have been crap since they came out. You'd figure they'd have USB2 capture devices ready as soon as USB2 started shipping.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
What I'd like most in a PVR is a system allowing pitch-corrected speedup. Some shows I want to watch in real time, others I'd like pumped at least a few percent faster.
;))
(In addition to the other things you name, like cutting out the junk
timothy
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Uncompressed=bad in this case.
Uncompressed video means you have to waste CPU time compressing the video if you want to record.
The fact is, that OK video quality can be obtained by passing MPEG2 over a USB1.1 link. Just because your average USB1.1 TV tuner uses worse compression than MPEG2 doesn't mean that USB1.1 is bad for PVRs.
Although USB2 makes for some nice additional headroom if you want to crank up the MPEG2 bitrate really high. But anything above 8 megabits/sec can't be archived to DVD without recompression anyway. (At least not if you want it to play on any DVD player.)
55 pounds translates to at least 80-90 dollars US these days I believe, which is more than an Avermedia M179 goes for, which has built in MPEG2 compression, allowing you to record high-quality TV with minimal CPU usage. (When MythTV records from my Haup PVR-350 on my machine, there is zero noticeable CPU usage. I've stressed the hell out of my system by doing major recompiles during recordings and it didn't drop a single frame.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"but if you've ever tried encoding in MPEG 1 or 2, you're doing much better than me if you can do it in real time (MPEG 4 I can do in real time)"
heh...that's the exact opposite of my experience. With my old 350MHz P-II and AiW128 I could encode MPEG 1 or 2 realtime without much trouble (MPEG2 dropped frames at higher resolutions), but MPEG4 maxed around 4FPS when I was doing DVD rips. I never tried to do it realtime.
about your other comment, I would assume that it is easier on the system to just pull in the 30MB/sec from the USB2 port and shoot it straight to the video card with something like DirectX Video Acceleration or similar, rather than taking in a compressed stream and decoding it.
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