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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??
Slashdot : Commercials for nerds, it's money that matters.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Easy.
VideoLAN
"Broadcast" from your server with TV tuner as source, watch anywhere on your LAN.
It works well. VideoLAN+server full of TV and DVD rips = my very own Video on Demand system that blows the doors off of what Comcast offers.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Maybe it's not 24-bit color.
"Full resolution" is meaningless when you talk about an analog signal, too.
ATi's TV Wonders in the past have considered 320x240 to be "full resolution", and anything higher was scaled up (video captures) or interpolated (still captures) from that.
I don't know if it natively captures any higher now, but 320x240x16 at 24 fps isn't unreasonable.
ATi used to really shine at all this cross-media stuff, nowadays they're teh suck. TV-Out quality on my 9800 is absolutely awful compared to a cheap GeForce 5200, for instance.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
... 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.
A) NTSC is 29.97 FPS, PAL is 25. B) YUY2 video (essentially, full quality digital component video) is 16 bits per pixel. So take a 720x480 image 30 times per second at 16 bits per pixel and you get about 20 megabytes per second. USB2.0 supports up to 480mbits per second, or 60 megabytes. While it is more CPU dependent than firewire, it DOES have the bandwidth. I work for Avid, and our $25,000 Adrenaline box connects to the PC via firewire and is by no means limited by the fact that the firewire bus is only 50 megabytes per second. It captures uncompressed with impeccable reliability. USB 2 isn't optimal for a true pro video editing setup, but at the very least it DOES support the bitrate full quality NTSC video requires.
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
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
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.
They mean uncompressed over the USB2 wire. Once it reaches the computer you can choose a format to encode to if you want to record it.
Older USB1 tuners would compress the stream to make it fit in to USB1's bandwidth (or lack thereof), usually with a low quality MPEG1. If you wanted it in a different format, you then had to transcode, making the quality even worse.
The USB2 tuners deliver the raw signal from the ADCs to the PC tuner software. What is done with it from there is the user's choice. You can record the stream uncompressed (at least in the last version of ATIs tuner software I used.)
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
>> it's not worth watching
Well, guess what, even uncompressed TV is not really worth watching. Two hundred channels of complete bullshit.
It doesn't have a comb, but I use the ADSTech Pyro A/V Link to convert NTSC (it works with PAL too) to standard DV. You only need a comb filter when you're dealing with composite or less, anyway.
How did you come to the conclusion that your card stretches 640 pixels to 720? If you went solely on the width of the frame on your computer screen, then it's likely that your card really does capture at 720 pixels. Those 720 pixels are actually supposed to be horizontally thinner on a real NTSC display than they are when you display the video without any aspect ratio correction. For example, if you have an NTSC source with a circle in the center that appears to be a perfect circle on an NTSC set, when you capture it on the PC and display it unmodified, the circle WILL look horizontally fat. However, take that same source, after capturing, and play it back out on a device that supports 720x480 output to NTSC (nVidia cards do this), and it will look correct again.
If you're expecting perfect circles to stay perfect at 720 pixels capture, that will NEVER happen, because there simply isn't any more horizontal data to capture. If you want your final encoded file to have the correct aspect when played back on a square-pixel PC display, then resize it to 640x480 during the encode (NEVER resize vertically though, you'll mess up the fields). I personally recommend leaving the video at 720x480 and using a player such as DScaler to correct the aspect ratio - that way, you retain as much of the original resolution as possible. I find that encoding to Divx at a sufficient bitrate to fill a full CD-R with 30 minutes of video to give very high quality results (I do almost no processing during my encodes - only to clean up the existing video, never to delace it).
FC Closer
"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.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.