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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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
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!!!!
The EyeTV boxes do in fact have TV tuners. The EyeTV 200 is a FireWire based PVR-like device for Mac. (It's about $300, though).
Broadcasters are only obligated to switch to ATSC when 80% of the local population are actually able to obtain ATSC signals. That means, that 80% of the local population will actually need HDTV tuners and monitors in place.
That is a LONG way off for most of the US.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
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).
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.
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