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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*
(Oddly, /. itself at first thought that I should not see this article either...)
"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!)
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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!
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
What will they think of next? The internet on TV??
Will it take rabbit ears?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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1st, lets assume I would like to watch TV on my computer. (Don't tell anybody, that's why they made TVs.
2nd, let's assume that I want to watch any kind of video uncompressed on my computer.
It dosen't make any sense to me.
I'm waiting for TV via Wifi. Oh wait, I guess TV already is wireless.
This space available for rent.
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.
Watch tv on a notebook? First we need a decent battery pack!!!!!
I guess at first we need something to watch. I don't have a notebook to search for an antenna connector if I'd like to watch TV. With a DVB-T tuner, this could be quite handy. Just put it in your notebook bag, lug it in whenever you want to see dumb TV instead of dumb internet pages via your hijacked wlan connection. Or just watch some reality show starring YOU while the cops get you :-)
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
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.
Actually, I did run across a HDTV USB2.0 tuner but I don't know much about it.
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 watch tv on my laptop already using the wireless connection to my dekstop using it's PVR-250 mpeg2 card.
/dev/video1 &
ssh desktop nc -l -p 7000
nc desktop 7000 | mplayer -framedrop &
ssh desktop ptune-ui.pl
And whala! I watch TV on my laptop via 802.11g wireless card. (I use prism54 based cards.. very easy to setup on newer kernels)
Of course you can use video lan server to do it if you want to get fancy, but I like netcat and to run the channel changing gui perl script thru X tunneling over ssh.
Betcha you Windows guys didn't know I could build a video streamer using 2 lines in a Bash shell, did you? And people say Linux is sooo hard.
But if you want to get fancy check out VLS (VLC is a popular media player in Windows already, too. VLS is the server half and it only runs on Unix-style boxes)
Use that and buy a cheapo Bttv based card or a nice mpeg2 encoder like mine. All the video you need on your palm pilot or laptop, or seperate desktop computer you'd ever want. And if you have one of those faast DSL or cable lines you can even stream tv or dvd's or whatever to yourself at work.
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
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?
I've been looking for the smallest box I can get away with for my Powerbook that can do one thing:
Display the signal from a component or SVideo source on the screen.
I don't need a tuner or anything else fancy. Firewire or USB is fine, whatever works on the Powerbook.
A cardbus tv tuner out there?
I get tired of this "let's put everything on USB" crap that happens all too often...
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?
With a TV out card in my PC, I could set this bad boy up and use my laptop LCD effectively as a second monitor (albeit at a shitty resolution).
As far as devices, my personal preference is a Canopus ADVC-100 connected to the output from a VCR. YMMV of course.
Obligatory Plug - Please check out my online novel.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
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.
using a wintv tunercard in a desktop PC i was watching tv over a T-10 network.
the entire C: drive was shared and i just doubleclicked the wintv shortcut in program files and VIOLA
there really is nothing new anymore
anything like desktop anywhere.... I was pretty sure they already did at PARC which is where Jobs stole the mac windows from that bill stole later.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
Betcha you Windows guys didn't know I could build a video streamer using 2 lines in a Bash shell, did you? And people say Linux is sooo hard.
Doctors go to school for 8 years to write 2 lines on a prescription . . .
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
they stop using the exact same TV tuner from Philips that everyone uses in their TV Tuners whether USB or firewire.
The biggest leap forward will be when it's a simple USB dongle like this
This also make it truely useful laptops. Even something as big as a deck of cards is impractical with a laptop. I mean we're all already carrying our iPods.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
It can't be uncompressed. There isn't enough bandwidth on even USB2 to fit a proper PAL or NTSC TV signal at full resolution, 24bit colour 24frames/sec. Perhaps it's compressed using a lossless compression system or motion JPEG.
Whereas I live in a weak signal area with lots of interference at the boundary of 3 ITV regions - what I am most interested in is how well does it cope in such an area - especially when only a few inches from an operating laptop computer.
I'm confused... I've put the contents of a DVD on an external 2.5" hard drive and been able to watch it on my notebook using USB 1.1. OK it' was compressed by the ripping software to some degree, I guess, but the result was still way better than TV quality (and indeed to my eye it looked pretty much like the original DVD). What am I missing here? Faz
The 8xxx notebook series of Sager (AKA Clevo, Alienware, etc.) have had TV inputs for years.
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.
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".
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
because they don't provide linux drivers.
Why do all these damn manufacturers not realise how easy it would be for them to provide Linux drivers and that not everyone runs windows?
No!
Mod parent up!
Yeah.
Another new TV product that doesn't support HDTV.
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
... 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.
she uses a more modern vcr to actually change channels, and it transmits it all to ch 3.
all those old fullsize tv's will not turn useless, you'll just need a cable box/tuner capable of output on old style analogue channel of choice..
it will wreck OTA handheld useage, but how many handheld tv's have a life expectancy of 8 years?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Uncompressed digital video out of a decoder, even including framing data, blanking data, and so on, 'only' consumes 27MB/s. A standard digital video bus from the decoder, like ITU-656 is used, which is 8 bits wide, and runs at a consistent clock rate of 27MHz. It uses a 4:2:2 color space, which is actually only 16 bits of gamut information. So, uh, yes, there's enough bandwidth on USB 2.0 at 480Mbit/s, even though USB does not support isochronus streams, like video well.
Generally the problem is that the TV signal is not worth watching before any compression.
Ah - you have hit upon one of my pet projects. Most tv isn't worth watching at all. Some tv has good parts and bad parts, and this is the best tv you can find. If you could cut out the bad parts of tv episodes, and maybe reorder some scenes or something, you could compress shows down to vastly reduced, and concentrated hits of completely awesome. For example, imagine taking Babylon 5 and cutting enough to get it down to one season? First thing to do is cut out the doctor, who only drags the show down. Next cut out most of the mimbari, because I don't want to see elves in space. Next get rid of half of the episodes completely because they are throwaway filler. Get rid of the 5th season because there was a fifth season??? Splice in some of the movies and cut down the scenes, and you would have one intense viewing experience. So as you can see, sometimes shows are only worth watching after compression!
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
I've been the (mostly) happy user of a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. It is an USB2 external tv tuner that supports mpeg compression in hardware at bitrates up to 15MB/s
....
DVD's is about 6MB/s so i think that 15 should be enough for most
The only problem with compression and decompression is the timelag when changin channels
Who needs a TV / DVD / VCR when a laptop can do the lot?
But digital is critical. BTW, the BBC said some parts of the UK will have their analogue switched off by 2007 so an analogue only device won't much use if you live happen to live there.
When I was on Vaca last month, I alway take my laptop. Good for the kiddies to watch DVDs in the car. But I wanted to watch the end of the Olympics on TV. This device would have been perfect!!!
And people say Linux is sooo hard.
Well, it is for people who aren't versed in the magical incantations that allow one to stream video using a 3 line Bash script.
Also with the UK and most European countries havign far superior Digital Terestrial networks, WHY ANALOGUE? these units are already old technology!
Why have an expensive brick, decoding 5 channels (UK) of analogue signals into what is basically a framebuffer, digitising it, sending it uncompressed through the USB2, then if you wish to record the laptop then has to recode it into MPEG1/MPEG2/Whatever?
A Better product will receive the 40+ digital channels (UK) send the raw MPEG2 stream direct to the laptop, where either the laptop can display the stream, or save to disk, or both.
Have a nice day!
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well it helps to have 2 monitors. You can put the ballgame on kinda small in the upper right of one of your monitors and keep working, then when something exciting starts happening. You can quickly enlarge and catch all the full screen action.
Ok, you made a few good points there. But you shouldn't let the AC trolls get to you like that. I often see childish taunts by AC's to my posts but have to let them go. Most people won't even see them down at score -1, so it doesn't matter. Don't encourage the trolls with a reply.
As long as you leave in the part where Kosh tells Captain Sheridan "JUMP! JUMP! NOW!" and the part where Commander Ivanova is yelling "Boom Shakalala Boom" while she is 'fucking' that alien ambassador dude, I'm with you.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Having bought one of their crappy graphic cards, which work bad, i'm not going to chance it on other of their stuff.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I have a Powerbook and an airport express unit (the wireless usb wallwart thingy), and while playing video on the laptop would be nice, I would also like to use usb to send svideo to my home entertainment center.
This would let me run dvds and games from my laptop on my TV, without having to leave a computer in the living room.
Lots of TV tuners (and other ADC) suffer from RF interference plugged into the PCI bus, running off the chassis power supply. This device is isolated over USB, so it can have better quality, although it is pushing the USB envelope in bandwidth, as well as simulating realtime on an interruptable bus. I'd love to hear about a FireWire version, which could share the bus with other multimedia devices without digital interference.
--
make install -not war
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?
I've been doing this for years. All I had to do was attach the incoming coaxial connection, boot it up, and voila! It even came with a remote so I can watch the broadcasts in the comfort of my couch. Anyone interested should check out the amazing Sony WEGA.
I think your second request may be on the chopping block ;-) I guess I could make a copy that was all the stuff I took out, which would be the most bizzare and directionless show to ever be made?
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Not only that, the write-up is wrong. Its not uncompressed, its just compressed less! From the article "capture video in MPEG 1/2/4, AVI and Windows Media formats". Those are all compressed (and lossy) formats. Even DV, which most people use when using Firewire, is compressed. For truly uncompressed video, prepare to have your 200 GB hard drive melt down in a matter of a few 10's of minutes (if it can even keep up without dropping frames).
Well, uh, alright. Carry on then!
I am looking for a video capture solution with a 2D comb filter that can capture 'true' 720x480 with the overscan area included. I have a cx23881-based card that claims to do 720x480 but from what I have observed, its 720x480 is actually 640x480 stretched to 720x480 which is useless at best...
After reading the article, I see that this USB thing uses ATI's Theater 200. Who has info about this?
Whala!?
peut-être vous avez voulu écrire "voilà"
No.
>> it's not worth watching
Well, guess what, even uncompressed TV is not really worth watching. Two hundred channels of complete bullshit.
But I can't find anything (or combination of things) that
A) Does that (with high quality, like 25Mbps)
B) Edits it too
C) Exports and Saves to something other things can read
So, DV might as well be a halfway solution. I mean, if it existed, it would be popular with amateur nitpicky videophiles and we'd hear about it, no?
Except with MPEG, I have to:
a) downsample to some pathetic bitrate. No thanks, I'll stick with 25Mbps
b) deal with crappy interframe compression compared to DV
c) lose more data than DV on the cuts
d) find an editor that will actually edit MPEG. FCP and Premiere don't do it natively. Got something else in mind that doesn't re-encode the stream when you save it?
Using a USB port to watch TV on your laptop sounds cool but doesn't the areial antenna get kind of heavy?
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HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I just ordered one of these for myself. It doesn't pipe-in uncompressed video via usb 2.0, but it does do hardware-divx encoding in the box and the software is said to be pretty evolved. Why would you want uncompressed video anyway if you can compress in HW with almost-raw quality anyway? Takes less HD space and no CPU time to compress after the fact.
Why bother with a tuner?
I've got a sweet "V-Stream Xpert DVD Maker" video capture device that even came with software for "time shifting". Who needs a tuner when you are plugged into a cable box or VCR?
Works great, has S-Video and RCA connections so it will take anything you throw at it. It's USB 2.0 but backwards compatible with 1.1, although USB 2.0 allows for recordings in 720 x 480 (30 FPS). Even has a timer function which is great for recording future shows. (Taped Survivor last night).
Works well with anything that supports capture (VirtualDub, Nero, WDM applications). Even used it to set up a security camera for a while.
You can buy one here (first google result)
Get your Unix fortune now!
hehehe
"He's a real midnight golfer"
Not necessarily. You are correct, in the context of the average PC available today (even with a 200GB HD, that's only good enough for 200 minutes of uncompressed!). However, RAID a bunch of those 200GB drives together (say, 4 or 8, or even 10 - 2TB good enough for you?) and you suddenly have both the drive bandwidth and the storage space to record true uncompressed. Yes, I agree, for archival purposes you'll more than likely have to reencode, however this gives you full control over the encoding process, and thus the best possible quality given the settings used in the encoder.
Perhaps it's not so viable CURRENTLY, I'll agree. But most bleeding-edge technology is not viable during it's very early days. Give it some time, and these devices will have a more practical use.
FC Closer