Hardware MPEG2 TV Tuners Compared

EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has put together an intriguing comparison of TV tuner cards with hardware MPEG2 acceleration from ATI, eVGA, and Hauppauge. The article examines CPU utilization for typical PVR tasks and highlights some very apparent image quality differences between the three cards. Testing was apparently done with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, but does anyone have experience with the cards in MythTV?"

Comments

Interesting

[AKAImBatman]

An interesting article, to say the least. I'm somewhat surprised that MPEG4 encoders haven't started popping up, though. MPEG2 hardware has been around since the days of the original Pentiums, but Hauppauge has had things pretty much sewn up. Not because Hauppauge's hardware is that much better mind you, but more because the market hasn't been that big. Video files (especially MPEG2) have always been very large. Computers have only had enough capacity to deal with these on a regular basis in the last few years.

Now for just a generic TV Tuner, there are other options besides Hauppauge. *However*, almost all of the successful TV Cards use the same Brooktree (now Conexant) chipset. This has meant that the quality of the card drivers has been something of deciding factor, which Hauppauge always seemed to do a better job of until recently. Now with "digital convergence" on the horizon, suddenly everyone and their dog is producing usable drivers for just about every OS and settop box in addition. Which, of course, was made easier by the fact that they all use the same chipsets.

On another note, a purple PCI card?! These guys are just going nuts with their solder masks, aren't they? As if there's something wrong with the color green. (Must be too 1980's.) If they *really* wanted to do something different, they should produce a transparent card with the interconnects lined with a cool color like red. i.e. Make it look like something out of Star Trek or something. :-)

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

What, are the mods smoking crack or something? Parent is not offtopic! Long-winded, yes. Offtopic, no.

Re:Interesting

[yamla]

Hauppauge always seemed to have better drivers? Bwah ha ha. That's laughable. I had one of Hauppauge's earlier cards, the high-end card before the -250 and -350, and the drivers were TERRIBLE. I don't think they ever released Microsoft-certified drivers. In any case, they regularly caused my computer to lock up and even when they worked, they didn't work very well. Now, I suppose it is possible that the drivers from other companies were even worse, but Hauppauge was skirting consumer-protection laws as it was.

ArsTechnica has some information on this, and on how to use third-party drivers, which can make things much more reliable. I cannot immediately find the article, however.

Re:Interesting

[martok]

Hardware MPEG/4 cards do exist. Plextor has their pxtv line which can do MPEG/4 capture and has recently released Linux drivers.

It's just unfortunate that these cards don't also support DV compression. MPEG is nice and all but sometimes when capturing from a camcorder or vhs, you want to edit the resulting video. MPEG is not ideal for this. Granted, DV capture devices do exist but none to my knowledge have a tuner.

Re:Interesting

[AKAImBatman]

Now, I suppose it is possible that the drivers from other companies were even worse, but Hauppauge was skirting consumer-protection laws as it was.

You obviously never tried the Pinnacle StudioTV drivers. Up until the most recent versions, it would blue screen my computer just by minimizing the TV application. Not to mention that DVR software (I used to use SlipStream) was completely unable to *change the channel*. Do you know how annoying it is to record the wrong show just because you forgot to switch the channel back before closing the TV app?

Trust me, Hauppauge's drivers may have been bad, but they weren't the worst.

Re:Interesting

[ajna]

Why would you need a "DV capture device"? Isn't the whole deal with DV cameras that you plug in the device via Firewire (or whatever pleases you/your platform of choice) and the DV stream is simply booted across the cable without molestation to your computer? I'm pretty sure my FW cable isn't doing any encoding on its own...

Re:Interesting

[Roached]

almost all of the successful TV Cards use the same Brooktree (now Conexant) chipset. This has meant that the quality of the card drivers has been something of deciding factor, which Hauppauge always seemed to do a better job of until recently.

According to Hauppauge engineers, the reason they don't release an open source linux driver is precisely for this reason. They feel that their edge over competitors is in the tuning of their driver. Even so, by sniffing the I2C bus on these cards you can pretty much figure out what their driver is doing, which makes this moot (The PVR-150 IVTV driver is rapidly being developed now and is quite usable under MythTV).

Re:Interesting

[martok]

This is true if your camcorder is a digital one and has firewire ports. However, cards like the Pinnacle moviebox av/dv lines support regular analogue inputs such as rca and s/video and use dv to compression running over the firewire cable. However, no TV tuner.

Re:Interesting

[MrX2]

How is MediaPortal to others ?? Does any one use it?? http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/

Re:Interesting

[pla]

This is true if your camcorder is a digital one and has firewire ports.

...As opposed to all those analogue Digital Video camcorders?

Re:Interesting

[DickBreath]

Plextor has their pxtv line which can do MPEG/4 capture and has recently released Linux drivers.

Link. Plextor did recently release open source drivers for their tuner cards.

Re:Interesting

[EggyToast]

Not exactly. It's not recompressed but it is encoded into .dv format. The video on the tape is just raw video -- if there was a way to browse the tape, you wouldn't just see a big .dv file (or series of files).

In most DV camcorders, they function as a .dv capture device. You can also purchase external (and internal, I'm sure) capture devices that capture direct to .dv format.

If you were to use a non DV camcorder and wanted to capture it as a .dv stream, you would need said capture device.

The stream is still unmolested, but it is being encoded into a .dv file. That's part of the reason why you need specific software in order to capture said video, rather than simply mounting it as a drive and copying it like it was a big file.

Re:Interesting

[benow]

Plextor PX-TV402U - US$199

• First Official DivX Certified PC PVR Product
• Hardware Encode to DivX, MPEG-4, MPEG-2/DVD and MPEG-1/VCD
• Watch, Pause and Record Live TV
• High-Quality TV Tuner Included
• Free Electronic Programming Guide (EPG)
• Schedule Recording For When You Are Away
• Composite Video, S-Video, Composite Audio, RF/Coaxial Inputs
• DivX Certified Hardware and DivX Licensed Software
• InterVideo WinDVR and WinDVD Creator Software Included
• USB 2.0 Interface for Best Quality Video
• Burn Direct-to-Disc and Edit-on-Disc Supported
• One-year full warranty (parts, labor or replacement)

and, active linux support... way to go Plextor! OGG/Theora support would be a plus, but that's not stable, yet... still, use that upgradable firmware for something! Nice device. I'm planning on getting one.

Re:Interesting

[diogenesx]

I pretty sure that he meant capturing analog video and encoding it into dv format, ie. capture vhs home movies, edit, make dvd.

Re:Interesting

[jbr439]

Which does not prevent Hauppauge from releasing closed source drivers a la NVidia graphic drivers. That Hauppauge will not do that speaks volumes of their commitment to Linux.

Now this lack of commitment wouldn't be so bad except Hauppauge has the gall to use Linux in their Media MVP product. And, to further add insult to injury, Hauppauge does not provide Linux server software for this product, only Windows based software.

Hauppauge seems to be very good at taking from the OSS community. It's the giving back part that Hauppauge appears to be unwilling to grasp.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I noticed that every once in a while several posts get modded down at once. What happens is some troll gets mod points (not that hard to do) on a duplicate account, and will blow them all on down-mods as a trolling technique. Don't worry about it, they will be fixed later on by non-troll moderators.

Re:Interesting

[Chris Burke]

I suppose I didn't notice the way that the OP was written, because at first I agreed completely. But I guess I don't know anything about the quality of Hauppage drivers.

What I know (and care) about are the linux drivers for Hauppage cards. I've tried several different cards that use the bttv.o chipset driver and several with the Connexant (can't remember module name, cx8800.o or something) driver, and the former provided superior image quality. I could never get the contrast/brightness settings to provide a picture that showed detail in dark areas but wasn't washed out in light areas. I thought it might have been my LCD monitor, but after trying out two cx*.o cards and then going back to the faithful WinTV card I saw that it was a chipset/driver problem.

As it has been and will be for the future (but always getting better), with Linux it's always about finding out what hardware is best supported and buying that. The bt* based cards of Hauppage fall in that category.

Now that I look at it, it seems the Hauppage card in the article uses a Conexant-based chipset. I'm thinking that makes this review much less useful from the standpoint of creating a PVR in linux.

Re:Interesting

[leoc]

I have one and it works well, with the following problems:

1. The audio/video inputs are recessed in the case, making it hard to plug in my higer quality, shielded audio/video cables. My SVHS cable connector fits the SVHS plug on the Plextor, but only barely and it can fall out easily. I will need to modify the case to fix this problem.

2. The only way to capture video on Linux right now is by using the sample "gorecord" application, which while it works fine for simple captures, has a lot of problems doing bigger stuff.

3. Related to #2, there is a dearth of applications that support the device via its V4L2 interface. I undrstand that MythTV supports it, but I have not tried it yet so I cannot say how well it works. It would be great if other apps like mencoder, ffmpeg and transcoder picked up support for it too.

Re:Interesting

[Johnboi Waltune]

*However*, almost all of the successful TV Cards use the same Brooktree (now Conexant) chipset.

Of the 3 cards reviewed in TFA, only Hauppauge uses Conexant. ATI uses a homegrown chipset, and eVGA uses LSI for the encoder and Philips for the TV decoder.

Re:Interesting

[halfelven]

MPEG2 is still popular for those cards because it's directly interoperable with the existing DVD players. The MPEG2 files captured by the MPEG2 cards can be directly imported into a DVD authoring software, no conversion (hence, no quality loss) required.

Re:Interesting

[TheGratefulNet]

the plextor mp2 encoder sucks!

tried it and also tried it with mp4 mode.

you can't configure much, the quality is piss poor and I had to go back to software based encoders (TMPGenc is still the king).

I am still sticking with my direct-tivo since it saves the mpeg files from the dish directly to the disk.

until the consumer mpeg hardware encoders really grow up significantly, software-based ones are still the best to use, if you plan to burn a dvd from the file and quality matters to you.

Re:Interesting

[TheGratefulNet]

for simple mpeg video editing, check out 'womble' (google for it).

its a DIRECT mpeg video editor. does NOT re-encode if all you do is cut commercials (which is what most consumers do for 'editing').

Re:Interesting

[philwx]

Hauppauge always seemed to have better drivers? Bwah ha ha. That's laughable. I had one of Hauppauge's earlier cards, the high-end card before the -250 and -350, and the drivers were TERRIBLE. I don't think they ever released Microsoft-certified drivers. In any case, they regularly caused my computer to lock up and even when they worked, they didn't work very well

Totally agree. Got the Hauppage card in 97 or 98, no tech support, caused computer hanging and sometimes reboots, didn't work half the time. Sometimes it just displayed a purple screen, as I recall. Took it out and threw it away, $128 down the drain. Back in 98 that was a lot of money.

Re:Interesting

[yamla]

Have you tried more recently? Have you had any luck with other brands?

Re:Interesting

[philwx]

This site sells a somewhat modern one for $20. It's an inexpensive way to try it out. I would imagine it has improved since the late 90s. Never heard of any other brands that sell those. http://www.surpluscomputers.com/store/main.aspx?p= ItemDetail&item=CRD10186

Re:Interesting

[benow]

Of course, there are divx & dvd standalone players... some even do divx off dvd-r, which ~8hrs of dvd video, orso. Perhaps not as high fidelity as straight mpeg2, and only divx3 but perfectly fine for most uses (recorded tv, home video, etc).

Mirror

[winkydink]

In case of slowness a mirror of all pages is available here

Re:Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey look it's Captain Karmawhore.

Re:Mirror

[winkydink]

Oh please. Karma? Yeah, right. I have a whole list of things on my todo list to boodt karma.

Did you even read the subject line of my posting history?

4 out of the last 24 posts spanning the last 5 days were links to mirrors. 3 more were responding to people who seem to think this is all a diabolical plot.

Ooops, make that 4.

Then again, I guess I could post the mirrored links as an AC since then I'd have the benefit of pointing out the assholic tendencies of certain people without damaging my "precious" karma.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to call those MIT guys with the paper generator so we can start work in a random post generator. I plan to offer it to everybody on /. that wants to boost their karma.

Before it gets slashdotted...

[Toasty16]

Here's the conclusion for all of you latecomers:

"Hauppauge's PVR line of cards has held the crown for hardware MPEG2 TV tuner cards for the past few years, and while the PVR-150MCE l.p. has low CPU utilization and the quickest initialization and channel change times, its image quality is clearly lacking. The bundle could also use a DVD decoder to meet Media Center Edition 2005's compatibility requirements. Still, it's the only true low profile card in the round-up, and at $67 online, it's certainly affordable.

The TV Wonder Elite is a new contender in the hardware MPEG2 TV tuner market, and ATI has packaged the Elite as an all-inclusive solution that comes with everything you need to transform your PC into a personal video recorder. With low CPU utilization, good image quality, and an excellent remote control, it's a pretty slick solution. However the bundled PowerCinema software seems like a step backwards from ATI's old Multimedia Center, and it doesn't even come close to the functionality of Media Center Edition 2005. At $133 online, the TV Wonder Elite is by far the most expensive tuner in this round-up. You get what you pay for, though; the remote alone is worth $50.

eVGA NVTV April 2005 Surprisingly, the best image quality comes from the least expensive tuner, eVGA's $65 NVTV. The card's bundled NVDVD decoder also makes the card ready to run with Media Center out of the box, provided you have a DirectX 9 graphics card. That's something the other cards lack. The NVTV does have its shortcomings. The card's CPU utilization tends to be a little higher than the others, although not by a significant enough margin to cause concern. The driver bug that plagued our Athlon 64 test system is also a cause for concern, although the card had no issues with our Intel test platform.

Overall, it's hard to come up with a verdict. The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image quality. Although the TV Wonder Elite has great image quality, works flawlessly, and comes with a swanky remote, it costs twice as much as the competition. The eVGA NVTV, which also has low CPU utilization and great image quality, runs only $62 online and comes bundled with the NVDVD decoder, making it perfect for Media Center Edition and thus our Editor's Choice. Just keep in mind that if you have an Athlon 64 system with a VIA chipset, you might want to avoid the NVTV until NVIDIA resolves its issues with that platform."

Re:Before it gets slashdotted...

[qualico]

"The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image"

According to Hauppage:
"The WinTV-PVR-150MCE has the best video quality of any Media Center TV tuner,..."
Hauppauge PVR 150MCE

But its obvious this is not the case when you look at the comparison.

*sigh*, marketing, go figure.

Re:Before it gets slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just took a quick glimse at it and I have no knowledge of these TV-cards but don't you need some kind of smartcard interface för your paid for channels (most of them). I do want to decode the cable signal, right?

Re:Before it gets slashdotted...

[hendridm]

I can vouch for the eVGA NVTV card. I threw one in the media center I built a month ago and it works quite well. Good bang for the buck. They even have a dual tuner card for PiP, but it's cheaper just to buy two of them.

Granted, I'm using MCE 2005, so I can't vouch for other media center offerings.

Re:Before it gets slashdotted...

[bluekanoodle]

If you have a satellite box or other cable receiver, you would use an ir blaster to change the channels on the receiver before feeding it to your tuner card.

I'm such a tool

[karn096]

I have a tivo.

Re:I'm such a tool

[crypto55]

Eh... I looked into getting a Tivo, but a 200GB model with a DVD burner costs upwards of 600 dollars, before the subscription plan. Currently, Tivo doesn't really offer anything unique anymore. it's fall behind computer-based software and hardware, although most PVR n00bs don't know about any of the other choices that are available on the market. Computer-based PVRs will probably always have the upper hand over small boxes that are specifically built to prevent modding. Honestly, who builds a box that will break if you remove a white cable by accident! (see MaxPC's hack; if you remove the white IR cable while modding, the remote will permanently fail to operate)

Re:I'm such a tool

[jarich]

I just replaced my Tivo with a Mtyh box. ;)

Re:I'm such a tool

[brontus3927]

Well, duh. How is the box going to receive IR signals if there isn't an IR sensor plugged in?

Re:I'm such a tool

[TrailerTrash]

On the other hand, if you have sattelite (DirecTV in the states) tivo is your only choice. Myth and the windows equivalents don't function effectively with DirecTV.

Re:I'm such a tool

[bluekanoodle]

My media center 2005 works fine with my direct tv, I just have to use the ir blaster that came with my Media center remote to have the computer change the channel on the receiver.

Re:I'm such a tool

[amigabill]

And I've been told many times that I should have gotten a Tivo a couple years ago rather than try to get MythTV working. I even did have it pretty much working a few months ago, the only piece missing was working TV output via my NVidia card. A Gentoo update (emerge -uD world) ruined that in January, and it's been a very very senile computer since. Here comes round 27...

While that would have been the easy way out, and would have gotten me going long ago compared to the difficulty I've had working with MythTV/Linux (Gentoo and more recently Fedora Core 3), I would then not have had the opportunity to learn as much about Linux as I have. And trying to get MythTV working on Gentoo, a newbie is going to have to learn a great deal about Linux.

Besides, if I did it the easy way and bought a Tivo, or actually get MythTV running as I'd like it to, then I'd have to actually watch the stuff on TV today... Ech.

Re:I'm such a tool

[crypto55]

No, what it means is that if you accidentally remove the cable when modding the box, even if you put it back in, the IR port WILL NEVER WORK AGAIN, for whatever reason. I recall the guys at MaxPC saying that "the geniuses who are responsible for this little tidbit should get a manicure with the reverse side of a motherboard."

Re:I'm such a tool

[InvaderSkoodge]

The one unique thing that I have found that Tivo offers and nobody else seems to is reliability. In the 3.5 years I've had a Tivo, it has failed to record a show that I expected it to record only 3 times, not counting things out of it's control like power outages at programming conflicts. My XP Media Center system seems to have a problem at least once a week. Stupid errors like "Recording failed to start." The Media Center system has lots of features that my Tivo doesn't, but I still use the Tivo most because it works.

Re:I'm such a tool

[crypto55]

I don't know about that. SageTV will never fail to record a show, or at least has not in the past ~6 months that I've had it. The only thing you need to worry about is making sure that the app stays open. If someone were to log out, the app closes. As long as there is a user logged in, it should work. Sage also has a service that is supposed to run even when logged off, but that has never worked for me.

Re:I'm such a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about that. ... The only thing you need to worry about ... but that has never worked for me

You dispute his point, and then confirm it. I don't get it.

hauppauge

[BitchAss]

The hauppauge card is excellent with MythTV. Myth seems like it was built for the hauppauge card. The best Howtos are written with the hauppauge card in mind.

Re:hauppauge

[Nos.]

I have Myth running with a Hauppauge 350.. no regrets. The machine is a 650Mhz with I believe 128MB (might be 256). Watching live TV (which means I'm also recording - you know, PVR functionality) puts a load of about .1 - .2 on the box. So, while I may have spent a bit more on the card, I can do so without having to spend a lot on other hardware.

Re:hauppauge

[JaxGator75]

That's a great "How To" and is easily the most readable of any I've stumbled across. I had no luck trying to follow the KnoppMyth instructions, but it COULD be a hardware problem. Your link has inspired me to test out all the hardware and give it another shot after 2 weeks of avoiding the project altogether...

Hauppauge and Mythtv

[w.p.richardson]

The 150 series of cards will work, but the 250 is easier to get up and running with Knoppmyth. PVR350 has a couple of additional features, but they are a bear to get working with Myth.

Other capture cards are not as well supported as the Hauppauge cards.

Re:Hauppauge and Mythtv

[Mynister]

Good article. I am putting together a website about Media Center PC Reviews

I hope to cover all of the different opensource products and different manufacturers hardware

Check it out and all input is welcome!

Re:Hauppauge and Mythtv

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the latest ivtv drivers there's really not much difference between setting up a PVR150 or 250. The 350 is only slightly more difficult because it provides hardware MPEG decoding. This is no small feature in that it tends to produce a better picture than the tv out options on most video cards _and_ significantly reduces CPU load. Reduced CPU load leads to less heat and less cooling requirements making for a quieter machine, which becomes much more important once the computer is sitting next to your tv.

Re:Hauppauge and Mythtv

[Tiger4]

According to email from Hauppauge sales, the 500MCE is just a dual 150MCE. And according to the Hauppauge web site, the 150MCE is just a 250MCE in a "New low cost design. Same video quality as the WinTV-PVR-250MCE at a lower cost. With RCA jacks for audio input." http://www.hauppauge.com/Pages/compare_pvr.html

That tells me that the 150MCE, 250MCE, and 500MCE should be about the same for setup and functionality. The "new low cost design" aspect scares me some, but even the 500MCE is only $147 at pricewatch. We've all taken worse baths than that.

(those of us that bathe, anyway)

Re:Hauppauge and Mythtv

[Amorya]

The 350 is easy enough to get working if you're just using the TV input - it's no harder than the 250 for that. It's the TV output that's harder. However, with knoppmyth and this script it's now pretty much automatic. I've done both ways - the manual setup was a pain in the ass but with the script I installed a box within an hour.

Summary for the lazy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and for those who don't want to sift through 11 pages of ads and Flash:

Overall, it's hard to come up with a verdict. The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image quality. Although the TV Wonder Elite has great image quality, works flawlessly, and comes with a swanky remote, it costs twice as much as the competition. The eVGA NVTV, which also has low CPU utilization and great image quality, runs only $62 online and comes bundled with the NVDVD decoder, making it perfect for Media Center Edition and thus our Editor's Choice. Just keep in mind that if you have an Athlon 64 system with a VIA chipset, you might want to avoid the NVTV until NVIDIA resolves its issues with that platform.

What's the story with MythTV

[manno]

and what about the 250, and do the ATI or Nvidia cards work with MythTV? Anyone know?

Re:What's the story with MythTV

[BestNicksRTaken]

the 250 is an excellent piece of hardware, i've had both the ntsc and pal versions, and mythtv works with it fine.

the all in wonders from ati do not work with mythtv (they don't really work at all under linux except with gatos drivers).

Re:What's the story with MythTV

[Andy Dodd]

PVR-250 and 350 work great with MythTV for capture.

MythTV also supports the 350's TV-out capabilities, but it's much harder to get working and less stable, and does not work well for non-MPEG1/2 video. That said, I bought a 350 "just in case" and also because the 350 does FM while the 250 does not.

PVR-150 support is new, the chipset is different than the 250/350 but I believe is functional now, although may be less stable.

ATI and NV MPEG encoder cards are not supported at all under Linux as far as I know.

My one beef with the PVR-350 is that its tuner is pretty crappy compared to what's out there now. I have a MyHD MDP-100 HDTV card which has superior analog tuning capability but no Linux support or MPEG encoding capability. Using the 350's composite-in with an external VCR for tuning also yields superior quality, although the VCR's AGC causes Macrovision-like brightness pulsations when used with weak signals. (The video has much less noise though.) Mostlikely the Macrovision-like brightness pulsations are from the very same AGC circuit that Macrovision exploits. :(

MythTV also supports the HD-3000 HDTV tuner, and I believe 0.17 added support for capturing MPEG2 transport streams from 1394 devices. (Basically, from HD cable boxes with 1394 outputs that are not encrypted.)

USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[Potatomasher]

More importantly, does anyone have experience with usb tv tuners like the Hauppage WinTV-PVR-USB2 with MythTV ?
Are the linux drivers finally compatible with the video-for-linux model that MythTV requires ?

Has anyone tried using them in order to turn an XBox into a PVR that would like to share their experience ?

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[AKAImBatman]

More importantly, does anyone have experience with usb tv tuners like the Hauppage WinTV-PVR-USB2 with MythTV ?

My guess is that you're going to be waiting a very long time. Until someone produces *robust* USB drivers for Linux that don't choke on the slightest change or weird piece of hardware, it's going to be somewhat doubtful that useable TV card drivers are going to exist.

Your best bet is to go to the store and find the cheapest BT878-based PCI tuner you can find. Plug it in, compile all the BT878 stuff (or install SUSE or MythTV) and enjoy. You'll save yourself a lot of pain and anguish.

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[leoc]

My guess is that you're going to be waiting a very long time.

Or no time at all. I just got a Plextor M402U MJPEG/MPEG2/MPEG4 encoder (which is a USB2 device) and it works under Fedora Core 3 just fine. I can record video at the highest quality settings without any problems using the open source drivers provided by Plextor themselves. I've done MPEG2 at 6000k/s and it works fine and uses almost zero CPU time. The only downside right now is a lack of applications that support the necessary V4L2 extensions.

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[enrico_suave]

" More importantly, does anyone have experience with usb tv tuners like the Hauppage WinTV-PVR-USB2 with MythTV ?
Are the linux drivers finally compatible with the video-for-linux model that MythTV requires ?

Has anyone tried using them in order to turn an XBox into a PVR that would like to share their experience ?"

Well... not so much on the wintv pvr usb2.0 (there's some non-full functioning hacks/implementation/projects out there for it on linux but they are dormant) but as others point out if you're going USB route plextor and it's recently announced open source/linux drivers for the Plextor ConvertX line is probably the way to go.

IMHO, with the Xbox's USB 1.1 ports you'd be better off just using it as a network mythTV CLIENT to a mythtv backend/server in your basement or closet or something... or using Xbox Media center or the like to pull content from other networked resources. I.e. stop trying to make the xbox the PVR/tuner/encoder and use it as a lightweight frontend (once you replace the stock xbox fans!)

*shrug*

e.

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[Some Bitch]

My guess is that you're going to be waiting a very long time.

I use a Hauppauge Nova-T USB for watching digital TV (DVB-T) with Myth and have no problems. One added bonus of DVB-T is that the data comes ready MPEG-2 encoded.

The only PCI card I've bought in the last year is a USB 2.0 card, everything else I buy is USB these days (802.11g/printer/bluetooth/RF remote control are among this years purchases) and Linux gives me no problems with any of it.

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[MyForest]

Same here - I'm using the Nova-T USB device in the UK with FreeView (digital over-the-air). I do get some transmission problems, but no worse than my old set-top box. Oddly they tend to happen in the middle of the night.

It works pretty well under Myth and having the digital content recorded directly is a great feature. I typically get about 2GiB an hour for the 720x576 content that we have in the UK.

I'll admit I'm looking for a second device and I'll probably go for one of the USB2 devices. It really helps your uptime to have things that don't need the power off to move them around. Currently at sixty days and counting - sadly one of our visitors got a bit keen with the "Start a new instance of Myth" button on the remote control :)

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[tehdaemon]

802.11g usb and linux? which card/model?

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you point me to a linux/mythtv "howto" for the plextor usb device? I just ordered one from newegg. Thanks!

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[leoc]

Unfortunately no. At the moment it is too new. I haven't had time to look into using Myth with it yet.

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[Some Bitch]

Belkin F5D7050UK and Suse 9.2 (ndiswrapper from CVS).

Re:USB TV-Tuners with hardware mpeg-2 encoders

[tehdaemon]

thanks for the info -

SageTV PVR

[crypto55]

I don't use Myth tv, although I've heard that it's pretty good. I built my own system with a 200GB PATA HDD and a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 TV tuner, which is not shown. Using Myth instead of MCE probably wouldn't make much difference in the quality of the encoded video, if any at all, because all encoding is done on the card itself or with software encoders that are not part of the GUI. Myth is just the front end, and is used because it's open source, not for its superior quality. Although I don't use it, Myth has some pretty nifty features like a webserver for setting up recordings remotely, as well as commercial skip and other nice features.
As far as front ends not provided by MS or linux based, I definitely think that SageTV is the best Windows tv software. It has a great network client app which lets users access the full server remotely, either via a network or over the internet. It's nice to look at and is remote-control friendly. On the other hand, it's current version, 2.2.8, lacks commercial skips and a webserver (although plugins for both are available). Besides that, it's definitly one of, if not the, best front end available for windows, that's not a damn OS. Both missing features listed above are expected to be included in version 3.0, which is scheduled to be released some time this summer, I believe.
One piece of advice that everyone who has ever bought a Hauppauge TV Tuner knows is that do not use the bundled recording software. Hauppauge did a great job on its hardware design but seems to have outsourced its software design to a bunch of monkeys on typewriters currently residing in the Congo.

Re:SageTV PVR

[davidmcw]

Honestly I don't know why more people don't go the old 'build your own PVR system'.

Having checked out the Knoppmyth site it would appear that after only a new PC, tuner card, degree in computer science and many weeks of messing around with it, I would certainly end up with something that will work.

It would only require my wife and kids completeing their associates in computing for them to be able to use it. Oh, and don't forget the job working nights that I will have to take on as I will spend all day every day supporting it.

I mean, who do these TiVo johnnies think they are? Why would mr & mrs joe public ever use anything that they can plug in and just have work. Don't they realise that everyone likes to tinker around way out of their depth.

### Caution the above passages may contain trace elements of sarcasm ###

Re:SageTV PVR

[timeOday]

You don't need to stand up for "Joe Sixpack." He doesn't care, because he's not here.

Re:SageTV PVR

[boomgopher]

I definitely think that SageTV is the best Windows tv software

Hear, hear! I went with SageTV, as it was by far the best performance of any of the other Windows-based PVR I tried (BeyondTV, GB-PVR, some others). The others had nice features, etc, but simply wouldn't run on the older system I was using to build a PVR (500Mhz Pentium3)

Re:SageTV PVR

[crypto55]

I wasn't talking about how great MythTV is. The whole point is that it takes knowhow to figure out how to set it up. SageTV requires very little expertise to get it working, but offers more advanced features that allow people to write their own plugins for the software.

Re:SageTV PVR

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm currently reviewing the Sage trial version, and not having great luck. My local broadcast channels don't show in the guide, even though they are enabled. Also, after installing the Sage client, Sage TV stopped working. As a positive the DirectV serial cable channel switcher worked great. If I pay for an pvr, I kind of expect it to work, otherwise I might as well go w/ Myth/Freevo.

Re:SageTV PVR

[Anonymous Coward]

Having checked out the Knoppmyth site it would appear that after only a new PC, tuner card, degree in computer science and many weeks of messing around with it, I would certainly end up with something that will work.

It would only require my wife and kids completeing their associates in computing for them to be able to use it. Oh, and don't forget the job working nights that I will have to take on as I will spend all day every day supporting it.

My parents are able to use the MythTV PVR I built for them. That being said, I have a masters degree in computer science, so perhaps that compensates for their lack of computer training. :)

Is is just me,

[InfallibleLies]

or do all of those shots look pretty terrible?

Re:Is is just me,

[rcamera]

it's not you - it's your monitor

Re:Is is just me,

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, yes they do. I use dual pvr-250s on my myth system and it never has looked as crappy as that. perhaps a large part of this is that what you are looking at is 480 so it has crap for resolution ... but its also interlaced ... which is being displayed on a progressive. that and i don't think i would trust using a modded xbox as a quality source ... but then again thats the wee bit of videophile in me.

Re:Is is just me,

[InfallibleLies]

No, it's not my monitor. I just mean that when I first saw a video recorder for the PC in 97 or 98, I was terribly unimpressed, and so avoided them for a long time. Now, I see these "next generation" cards, and am even more unimpressed. Sure, the quality got better, but shouldn't it look a little better than a VHS tape by now?

Re:Is is just me,

[TobyWong]

It's not just you... they are terrible. It's not just the jpg compression either.

The people who claim the IQ on these cards is good need to clean their glasses.

Re:Is is just me,

[Rakarra]

Nope, it's not just you. I wonder how much calibration went on with the capture settings of these cards (or at least, with the amount of "calibration" that you can do when your controls are so limited). When I first installed my PVR350, I found the default brightness/contrast/hue/saturation settings to be horrible. The image was way too dark and also oversaturated.. after a lot of tweaking the card captures a pretty good image.

Re:Is is just me,

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog capturing just won't get better, sorry. If you want quality, you gotta go the DVB or HDTV route. It's the only thing that gives a watcheable picture.

Re:Is is just me,

[Anonymous Coward]

Calibration is another reason why I don't do analog captures. Even if they were calibrated with an oscilloscope the picture quality would still be horrible. Analog capturing just sucks.

I swear by my Hauppauge

[TexVex]

I have the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 running on an Athlon 2200+ w/ 512 MB RAM, 16G OS/software hard drive, 250 GB video hard drive (both IDE). The machine also supports a DVD burner, and a USB-UIRT for remote controlling my cable box. The PVR portion of it comes from Sage TV. Oh, and the wireless. Mustn't forget the wireless.

This setup gives me a PVR package that has superior capabilities to my old DirecTiVo, but slightly (SLIGHTLY!) inferior quality. It records MPEG video that I can easily work with in many video players, video editors, and DVD authoring/burning packages. I can watch videos either streamed over wireless from the SageTV box's hard drive, or I can use the SageTV Client software.

The only weakness is slow channel change times (2 seconds or so). The computer has to control the cable box through IR, and in order to guarantee precision it "punches the remote control buttons" slowly. However, channel surfing is something I don't miss -- now the machine just records what I want, I watch it when I'm damn good and ready, and skipping commercials requires only a few taps on a key on the wireless keyboard I use to control the computer. (I could use a regular remote through the USB-UIRT but the keyboard is faster (though bulkier)).

Re:I swear by my Hauppauge

[fcrick]

I run the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 on my FC3 MythTV system, and I've had no problems whatsoever, and picture quality is great.

If you really want to hear from boots in the ground, check out #mythtv-users on freenode. The people there can give you very specific feedback about all the mythtv related cards, and point you to up-to-date resources about compatability and installation.

Re:I swear by my Hauppauge

[RandoX]

I'm running a Hauppauge 250 as well, using GB-PVR onto striped 160 gig SATA. Clearer than watching it on TV.

Don't agree on their picks..

[cbreaker]

In the sample pictures they provided, the Hauppage card was a little more jagged at some points but the image was a lot more clear. The other screenshots looked very blury.

Because I believe the Hauppage card is capturing the signal into the MPEG more accurately, without fussing with as much AA and smoothing - it will end up looking better on the TV screen - as would be what you would use it for in a PVR setting.

If you're capturing to view on your desktop monitor, then maybe the blurryish smooth images from the eVGA might do you better.

Re:Don't agree on their picks..

[ElmoOxygen]

That's the same thing that I was thinking. The Hauppage picture looks like a textbook example of taking a still from an interlaced video.

When it's actually playing on your tv it will look much better than the smoothed out/"de-interlaced" videos that have the prettier stills.

I'm suprised that they didn't do a little research into this common issue or at least ask someone with experience in analog/digital video.

Re:Don't agree on their picks..

[general_boy]

Methinks the Hauppauge card had comb filtering disabled, or maybe the comb filter was not working so well. The artifacts look like chroma dot crawl.

The others do look better, but a cartoon is only good for testing the comb filter (contrasty color-changes) for composite inputs, and noise in the pure color regions. Natural scenes such as moving trees/leaves or water ripples are better tests for an MPEG video encoder. What we're seeing in the review is effectively a comparison of the analog path to the encoder chips, and not so much the encoder chips themselves.

I use a PVR-250 exclusively in S-video mode and usually on Linux, and am super happy with the results - especially at low bit rates where even my best software encoders seem to choke.

other options for video capture / MPEG2

[bodrell]

I recently got a dish network PVR, and I wanted to know my options for moving content to my computer. Ideally, I would want to extract the video from the hard drive, but that is a really pain, if even possible on the particular model I got. Anyway, I decided if I ever do want to save any shows, it would make more sense to get a box that can do the capturing and encoding. If I were a sucker for high definition, this would not be an option, but the signal quality I get is not great enough that I would expend much effort worrying about recompression. I found a Macworld review of several devices that fit the bill. The Datavideo DAC-100 and Canopus ADVC-100 looked great. No TV tuner, but that doesn't always matter. I haven't bought either one, but it's nice to know they exist.

Anandtech also reviewed tuner cards yesterday

[Andyvan]

They reviewed 6 boards, and came to a different conclusion: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393

-- Andyvan

Re:Anandtech also reviewed tuner cards yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting review. But I'm constantly amazed by the staggering prices for PC cases or PCs which will visually integrate with other home entertainment devices. The "WinBook PowerSpec MCE 410" is a fine example of that pricing: $1195 (before a $200 mail-in rebate) for a nice P4 system that can be assembled at home for about 1/3 that price. Is a nice case REALLY worth $800?

Re:Anandtech also reviewed tuner cards yesterday

[Skunkworks]

I would have liked to have seen a comparison between the Hauppauge 150 and 250 cards for image quality since the two reviews are for different cards.

Re:Anandtech also reviewed tuner cards yesterday

[joNDoty]

The two NVTV cards tested seem to be a little different. The one in the anandtech review has twice the number of S-video and stereo jacks. Besides that, anandtech says "At $130 - $140 for a dual tuner card, the NVTV is fairly affordable..." Is anandtech trying to say that the NVTV actually costs that much, or that most dual-tuners cost that much and the NV one is cheaper? It's confusing. Techreport.com quotes the NVTV card at under $65.

Linux support

[techguy911]

I have the PVR-150 (non-MCE), but it has very sketchy IVTV support which MythTV needs. It seems clear that a lot of work in the installation, configuration, and hardware support of MythTV, IVTV, and LAME are needed.

Re:Linux support

[foobar01]

I have a PVR-350. I agree that IVTV and LIRC may not be so simple to get working. But there are plenty of guides out there that tell you exactly what to do. As the PVR-150 has only recently gained IVTV support, I'd still suggest getting a PVR-250 or PVR-350, since those have been supoorted by IVTV and MythTV for a while now and should work better.

Re:Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

You use pre-configured packages.

Using Yum for Fedora you can easily convert any Fedora Core 3 box to a Mythtv box.
http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php

Good instructions and provides everything you need. Makes things very simple.. They even have kernel drivers. No need to recompile ANYTHING or even issue so much as a 'make' command.

For you Debian users and probably Ubuntu users there are Mythtv-specific repositories to make installation easily. As there are for Gentoo, but obviously it's going to have to compile stuff, but it's automated.

But the Fedora is the most complete with documentation and step by step aviable.

Mythtv is for people who need/want something 'more' then what is aviable from MCE or a TiVO.

It's much more advanced then MCE.. you can have more cards, more front ends. It's much more flexible and you can 'backup' your DVDs and it handles Divx and all that.

With MCE you have DRM to contend with and all that big mess. Plus you need to buy a new OS with it and it only works with hardware-encoding cards.

With Mythtv you can use older or cheaper non-hardware encoding cards...

between Tivo (for the non-geek) and Mythtv (for the computer and media geek) and those 'free' DVRs that come from cable companies and such I see absolutely no reason to ever recomend or build a MCE box for somebody.

Even if they don't use Linux they can still have the Mythtv as the backend and run the front end on their OS X or Windows-based Laptops desktops... Which si something else you can't realy do with MCE, especially if you own Apple hardware.

for apple users
http://www.mythtv.info/moin.cgi/MythOnMacOs x

front-end for Windows users (need to have Linux backend to run the recording and such)
http://winmyth.sourceforge.net/

The only stiky part is that you can't use your ATI or Nvidia hardware cards to record like you can with MCE.

However you can use Hauppauge and Plextor (still in CVS, and this company supports linux and has released GPL drivers themselves) hardware encoding cards.

Plus MCE can't use non-hardware encoding cards and Mythtv can, so it's not like MCE has significant advantages in terms of hardware support.

An easier way

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an idea. Instead of everyone buying their own tv recorder, they could just record all the shows and put them online and then we can use already existing technologies to download them even before they are shown on TV. I think this would result in a net saving.

Re:An easier way

[foobar01]

When you put the legality issues aside, as well as the time wasted searching for and downloading the shows....well, then yeah -- your way is easier and better!

other DIY PVR/.MCE resources & recent reviews

[enrico_suave]

first, gratuitous link to my site build your own PVR and the byopvr forums.

Anandtech just did a round up of a bunch of windows MCE "certified" hardware encoding tuner cards.

Also HTPCnews did a Review comparing the new ATI 550 theater pro with the venerable wintv pvr150

E.

Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[Spud Stud]

Why not compare apples to apples? I'd more readily compare the two full-height PCI cards to the full-height Hauppauge 250 ($127) rather than the half-height 150. Of course, that may not have yielded the result the author intended.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[brontus3927]

There is a full height 150. It came out last month. 150 is the lastest version so it makes sense to review using the 150, but I agree it should have been the full height model instead of the low profile

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[qualico]

I was thinking maybe the 150 does not do hardware decoding and thus they wanted to compare that to similar cards.
Whereas the 250 does do hardware decoding to give less CPU utilization.

Going on memory here, may have my facts wrong though.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[hobbesx]

It's the 350 that does hardware decoding, the 250 is also encoding-only.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[MortisUmbra]

Oh brother. Because the Tech Report is definitely out to get them!

Seriously....i thought the picture quality looked like crap on it, and comparing apples to apples?

So take two $125+ and compare it to the NVCard, omg, those jerks are trying to screw over the eVGA card!

They are three similar cards (with the ATI jumping out because of the remote and whatnot) with similar features and similar specs, the half height issue doesnt affect the card. If the PVR 250 had a remote THEN maybe I would consider that apples to apples, but its not the same class of card. It costs twice as much without anything like a remote to eplain why it costs so much more.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[hedora]

To clear up some confusion:

• The 150 and 250 both do hardware encoding and software decoding. The 350 does hardware decoding. This isn't a big deal, since X (at least with nvidia cards) supports accelerated video decoding under linux. (The most important thing is support for hardware scaling) On the other hand the 350 is handy if you don't have a tv-out port on your video card.
• The 250 comes with a remote.

The PVR-250 is a good choice under linux since it works with MythTV and the remote is supported. On the other hand, the drivers are in beta.

Also, I looked at the sample screenshots, and the PVR-150 card seems to be misconfigured. I don't see those artifacts under MythTV with my PVR-250.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm. My PVR 250 came with a remote. Purchased at Fry's Electronics over a year ago. Cost about $150 at the time, if I recall correctly. Probably cheaper these days.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[halfelven]

Also, the TV-out connector on the 350 will always provide better quality for normal TV signal than any graphics card.
HDTV is different, though - for HDTV you _want_ to use the TV-out on an XvMC-accelerated card, such as an NVidia.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[BestNicksRTaken]

The original 250 comes with a remote.

The 250 **MCE** doesn't, it has an FM tuner instead (like the 350).

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[qualico]

Thanks for that.
was looking for a straight answer, my google was malformed.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[hedora]

I haven't noticed many image quality problems on my soon to be retired free 19" color set, although it was hard to set up nvtv correctly. I've since decided that my ancient 20" Dell Trinitron Monitor^H^H^H "HDTV" is a better option.

The monitor does 1600x1200@85Hz well, but that leads to bad 'stair stepping' artifacts on images with thin, straight lines, like anime.

1280x960 (twice 640x480, the resolution the PVR-250 is set to capture at) looks much better, and is still usable for web browsing, etc.

An HDTV tuner card would complicate matters since I'd need to pick a resolution that made sense after letterboxing... Ideally it would switch resolutions depending on whether it was playing NTSC, DVD or HDTV.

I also had to use xgamma to brighten up the image, since TV's have a higher gamma value than monitors, and the "brightness/contrast" adjustments on the monitor don't compensate for that.

Re:Why the Hauppauge 150 and not the 250?

[Ahnteis]

I believe the difference is the 250 does MPEG1 hardware encoding as well.

It's been said here many times...

[Mr. Cancelled]

If you use MythTV, an ATI card will not work. I'll go so far as to say that an ATI AIW card isn't reccomended for any Linux-based PVR work. The coders blame ATI, and ATI says "What? We released Linux drivers!". It's a lot of finger pointing, and in the end is just frustrating to any AIW owner, such as m'self.

The Hauppage on the other hand, is the most reccomended PVR card I've seen - Both on the Linux end and the Windows end of things. It has a built in mpeg decoder/encoder, which allows the systems CPU to focus on things other than converting video for playback.

I recently came across the Hauppage 350 for $160 and am seriously considering one, however as we move into the HDTV age, I'm wondering if an HDTV-capable solution might be a better option.

(Yes, I realize there's PC-based HDTV options, but the Mac link was handy)

Re:It's been said here many times...

[stratjakt]

The Hauppage is about the only one that actually works under linux, if that means it's the "best ever", then so be it.

The article is pretty right, the image quality of the Hauppages sucks when I compare a capture done on the 250 to a capture on my Tivo, of the exact same program on the exact same channel at the exact same time.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[JaxGator75]

I feel your pain. My AIW is now sitting in my wife's PC and does nothing but accelerate the 3D lives of her Sims families... Should have read more about Myth and Linux BEFORE spending money on hardware.

Thankfully, I recovered from this error and was able to get a PVR-250. ATI's MMC solution almost drove me to drinking (harder stuff than usual).

Re:It's been said here many times...

[rtos]

If you use MythTV, an ATI card will not work.

That's definitely not true. I'm currently using an ATI TV Wonder Pro in my MythTV box (Gentoo-based) and it works fine.

A lot of cards, including the ATI TV Wonder Pro, work via V4L and the bttv driver. Check it out. I've found that the card works far better in Linux than it did in Windows!

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I work in the multimedia department (Theater 550 Pro) at ATI. I also use Linux, and have for years.

Getting ATI to write an official Linux driver for the Theater 550 will be very, very difficult. We're already a small department in ATI (dwarfed by the Graphics side), and simply don't have the resources for it.

However, we will absolutely, 100%, offer support to anybody that wants to write an open-source driver for the Theater 550. We've heard a lot of "I'll do it," but when we follow up, there's nothing there.

So that's the situation. If anybody honestly wants to step up and write a v4l2 driver for the Theater 550 Pro, respond to this post and I'll contact you.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[MikeBabcock]

Someone moderate parent up.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[rco3]

I'm assuming that you've actually had contact with the GATOS project people, who have actually written functional software to use AIW cards under Linux in the past - right?

If not, try this:

Send Gatos-devel mailing list submissions to
gatos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

They're not using V4L2 for AIW, AFAICT mostly because it doesn't exist. I'm sure that if anyone in the community is going to be able to use your information, it's these guys.

Of course, I can't really imagine that the people running the V4L2 project would turn down support either. Unless it's the sort of support in which they are told that they have to sign NDA's which preclude ever writing any other software again, they aren't really given the information they need, and they aren't allowed to actually implement all the functionality they need to... not saying ATI is going to do that, but it's been known to happen.

While you're tossing 'em information, try sending them chip docs so that they can get a working driver again for my old 4MB AIW, too. I love that thing.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Mr Guy]

Considering the basis of your argument doesn't mean anything (same program/channel/time) I'm fairly sure you either didn't do the test, or you did it very poorly.

It's not a matter of popping in different hardware and comparing results. Since Tivo records at in high quality (assuming you don't mean high def, in which case the comparison is out of context for a PVR350) 544x480 at 5.8 Mbps and MythTV allows your PVR350 to record at 720x480 at 6 Mbps, I'd say your assesment of image quality applies more to the fact that you apparently found MythTV too difficult to set up properly (most likely using default settings that could be adjusted upwards for a dramatically better picture).

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of cards, including the ATI TV Wonder Pro, work via V4L

*Sigh*

The parent VERY CLEARLY noted that he was talking about AIW (All-in-Wonder) cards.

In any case, the ATI TV Wonder is the ONE exception (well, two really). Some ATI cards have V4L drivers, but they DO NOT WORK like normal V4L devices, and can only be viewed/captured with a program purpose-built for their non-standard interface (eg avview, which is a horrible program)...

I personally have an ATI AiW 8500 DV, and I can't use it for anything other than as a BASIC videocard.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Lord Angelbane]

I might consider throwing in my hat to project like this. If you would like to contact me, my sf address is angelbane@sourceforge.net

I've had been following the pvr-150 ivtv devel, and I contributed a few patches myself. Also I have quite a bit experience from helping to write code for the acx100 wireless driver.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true, how about posting all the info needed to write a driver on the ATI web site? There must be a developer's section there somewhere.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Ziviyr]

Yup, TVWonder VE here, works well on Linux in general.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

*Sigh* It also clearly was written by an idiot since he claimed that ATI cards don't work, when they do. Just because his All in Wonder doesn't work doesn't mean that none work, which is surely the point of the person who responded to him.

Way to buy a card everyone knows doesn't have video capture support in linux.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll sell the hardware but won't support it
on anything but win32
because "we don't have the resources" ?
fabulous
why don't you just make good documentation
for the things available without the need
for solicitors and NDA agreements ?
perhaps then some fool will do your job for you
and thank you for allowing them to do so!

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Lord Angelbane]

Or, my sourceforge isn't working - try angelbane@ou.edu

Jeff

Re:It's been said here many times...

[explorer]

To extend the previous poster's statement... Not only are the ATI cards insufficient in Linux as a capture device, but they're also inadequate for HDTV playback/TV out. The fglrx drivers support XVideo only up to a moderate resolution. At HDTV resolutions (1280x720 and 1920x1080 for sure), their XVideo just displays a black window. You have to use X shared memory, i.e. do ALL the rendering in software. A very difficult task. My Athlon 64 3200+ can't quite do it in real-time for all streams while simultaneously decoding 386kbps AC3. The hardware supports all the usual accelerations but there's no XvMC driver and the XVideo support stinks.

Re:It's been said here many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

However, we will absolutely, 100%, offer support to anybody that wants to write an open-source driver for the Theater 550. We've heard a lot of "I'll do it," but when we follow up, there's nothing there.

Cathedral 1 - Bazaar 0

Why low profile?

[brontus3927]

The Hauppage PVR-150 MCE comes in a low profile and full profile size. Realizing that there shouldn't be any difference in ability between the two sizes, it doesn't make sense to review a low profile card next to 2 full-profile card. A reader could get the impression that the Hauppage card is only available in low-profile and not purchase it for their full size case.

Also interesting to note is their poor review of the Hauppage PVR-150 MCE when every other review I've ever read calls it the best TV tuner add-in card ever produced, compared to other manufacuters and compared to Hauppage's other tuners the PVR-250 and PVR-350

Re:Why low profile?

[pla]

it doesn't make sense to review a low profile card next to 2 full-profile card.

It matters because the other two don't come in a low profile version... So if you plan to build a PVR using a microATX case (or even standard ATX in a pizza-box style case), you need to pick a card that comes in a low profile version.

Re:Why low profile?

[brontus3927]

Exactly. This comparison review is worthless for this purpose.

LIRC

[techguy911]

LIRC too

I'd rather have a plextor.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the Plextor TV
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp? desc ription=14-144-504&depa=0

PX-TV402...

They released GPL'd (themselves!!!!) drivers, support encoding of Mpeg2 AND Mpeg4 and work thru USB2. No need to crack open your case even.

However it's a recently released drivers and it's a work in progress.

Mythtv supports for it is in CVS, but it does work...

With mpeg2 you get good DVD-quality (after all DVD are mpeg2) but you use HUGE amounts of harddrive space. A movie in good mpeg2 quality will span several gigs of hardddrive space.

Having the option of recording into Divx (mpeg4 format) makes sense if you don't want to run huge drive arrays, and the option of recording in mpeg2 is smart for those 'favorite' high-fi movies.

Of course the magic bullet in Linux-land would be a hardware based Theora encoder. :)

The drivers are called 'go7007' and there is a write up for you gentoo freaks, at
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_go7007

I have a older ATI Wonder-VE and a Hauppauge PVR-350, but I am seriously considuring purchasing a Plextor PVR device. It's VERY smart of them to release GPL drivers. Maybe they will do the same for HDTV devices in the future..

Hardware MPEG4

[leoc]

I recently bought a Plextor M402U. It's a USB2 device that supports hardware MPEG4 encoding and has open source GPL'd drivers (except for the firmware, but thats freely distributable at least). MythTV supports it too, although I haven't tried it yet.

Re:Hardware MPEG4

[TheGratefulNet]

except: the encode on mp2 and mp4 files is REALLY REALLY BAD ;(

and usb2 can't go very far (distance). firewire would have been MUCH smarter (better protocol and greater wire length)

PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[lofi-rev]

I've got an Epia M10K box with a PVR-350 that works like a dream for TV recording and viewing. The built-in encoder and decoder means the processor is barely touched when performing actions with the card. The only draw back is the non-MPEG-2 video/DVD playback. Without unpatched video players you are forced to use the regular x11 output which chews up enough processing power to make somethings unwatchable. There are some hacks for mplayer and xine to work around this, but so far they have had audio delay issues with my current setup or required downgrading the driver version for the card. For now I live with slight frameloss when watching DVDs, but am looking forward to new hacks on mplayer and xine.

Re:PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[mattyrobinson69]

if you use xv for picture controls in mythtv, it _greatly_ decreases load.

Re:PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[lofi-rev]

The problem is xv doesn't work with the PVR-350 currently. The output is made up of two layers, one the MPEG-2 decoder output and two the overlay which X outputs to, using only x11, not xv. I'd be happy as a clam if xv worked with the drivers, but I'll settle for appropriatly working output to the decoder directly from the video player software.

Re:PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[mattyrobinson69]

how about the PVR-350's built in mpeg2 *decoder*? there's an option to enable that in mythtv-0.17 iirc

Re:PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[Amorya]

The 350's built in decoder is bloody brilliant. The quality of that is much better than the tuner of my regular TV - so much so that I always watch through the mythbox now unless it's recording something else. Seriously - when watching TV directly, there is some interference and grain - always has been. First time we booted the mythbox it was like a miracle - this is how TV is meant to look!

Re:PVR-350 + MythTV = Love at First Sight (Almost)

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an M10K that I use as a diskless minimyth system. It uses a customized kernel that supports the M10K to a T, including non-MPEG playback. I'm very satisfied with this completely silent solution.

My experience

[TobyWong]

I have a Hauppauge PVR250 (non MCE) and a Sapphire Theatrix 550 (new ATI chipset).

I've tried both MythTV and MCE2005.

Frankly I think the IQ on both of these cards is quite poor. If you fiddle with various settings/parameters you can achieve a "passable" picture quality at best.

I was really hyped when I heard about the ATI 550 chipset thinking finally I would get some decent IQ but alas, more of the same mushy looking crap.

As it stands now I'm just making due until something truly worthwhile finally comes out.

MPEG-2 Hardware

[bsd4me]

MPEG2 hardware has been around since the days of the original Pentiums...

I'm not positive about the MPEG4 specs, but the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 specs were written so that they were implementable on the largest available single-chip ASIC process at the time.

strange choice for their test video

[frankie]

The Lion King, like all standard animations, uses large swaths of relatively flat color punctuated by dark linework. Optimal compression for line art is substantially different from that of highly-shaded photographic imagery. Given that the vast majority of video available on TV is real-world, that test case seems like a poor indicator for typical performance.

Re:strange choice for their test video

[BrookHarty]

The Hauppauge card gets its ass handed to it when recording Anime in those screenshots. So its pretty real-world in that case, and to say its not is dishonest. Getting some facts about card support and quality of MythTV is one of the reasons I havnt bothered, cant find out what a good mpeg4 card is without searching forums, pfft.
The MythTV site is crap for detail on which hardware to use. I'm rather tired of hardware thats lists as "Working" when you dont find out, not with AMD 64 cpu's or other hardware combos, kernel version, video driver, etc...
Or even worse, It works, but has a few *Kinks*....

I'd love to pull tv shows instead of downloading them, but I want Mpeg4 support, good picture quality, and 100% stable. So far, sounds like you cant do it. Just look at the documentation from the website on hardware, nobody knows, so try to search the forums? Come on, how unprofessional.


3.1 Hardware

Hardware selection is a complex topic, one this HOWTO will only discuss briefly and in general terms. The following subsections offer some general guidance but stop short of offering specific recommendations.

For more detail about actual configurations that others have used, Mark Cooper has setup a hardware database at http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/. The website will let you browse what other users have reported as their hardware configuration, and how happy they are with the results.

If you have specific questions about the suitability of specific hardware choices, you can consult the archives of the mythtv-users mailing list at http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/ or post a question to the list.

Re:strange choice for their test video

[Frol]

It surely is. Also from the sample images it looks like the TV Wonder Elite and the eVGA NVTV filters the video much more aggressively. Given more detailed video sequences the Hauppauge card probably would have compared better.

Re:strange choice for their test video

[AaronStJ]

I don't know about you, but almost all of the TV I record on my Tivo is animated, not live action (Futurama, Simpsonss, Home Movies, pretty much all of the rest of adult swim).

Re:strange choice for their test video

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they should use something like that jpeg playboy female test.

MythTV and Hauppauge 250/350

[BlakeCaldwell]

I'm using the Hauppauge 250 and 350 for video inputs for MythTV, and the 350 for TV Out and hardware mpeg2 decoding. Love the cards, they're great. The ivtv drivers seem to bug out every once in a while, especially when I abuse the FFWD/RWD functions, but I gotta give it to the guys workin on the drivers - esp. Chris Kenedy, who seems to be the maintainer.

Re:MythTV and Hauppauge 250/350

[drooling-dog]

The ivtv drivers seem to bug out every once in a while, especially when I abuse the FFWD/RWD functions

Best to avoid this if you'll mainly be watching porn, then...

Some questions in re analog CCTV signals

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

It's just unfortunate that these cards don't also support DV compression. MPEG is nice and all but sometimes when capturing from a camcorder or vhs, you want to edit the resulting video. MPEG is not ideal for this. Granted, DV capture devices do exist but none to my knowledge have a tuner.

1) In our lab, we've been using an analog CCTV signal [which gets us 60 frames per second, versus maybe 15 frames per second for digital cameras]. The ATI TV cards can pick up the signal, but some of the Hauppauge hardware can't. Does anyone know the name of the standard used by an analog CCTV signal, and what specs a card a needs to meet so as to make sure that it will "see" an analog CCTV signal?

2) Digital Video over Firewire [IEEE 1394] is supposed to have a "direct to disk" feature, so that the intermediate "signal -> MPEG" compression layer is not necessary. Does anyone know of a "direct to disk" solution for analog CCTV signals?

3) Finally, how does the Leadtek WinFast hardware compare to the hardware in this review?

Thanks!

Re:Some questions in re analog CCTV signals

[Em Adespoton]

2) Digital Video over Firewire [IEEE 1394] is supposed to have a "direct to disk" feature, so that the intermediate "signal -> MPEG" compression layer is not necessary.

signal -> MPEG2 compression is not necessary because the signal being captured is already streamed as MPEG2 video. Firewire enables this to stream directly to a HDD. As far as streaming analog NTSC to a HDD, at some point it has to stop being analog, so DSP is needed. It would indeed be neat if someone could come up with a digital algorithm for representing an analog NTSC electrical signal however.

Re:Some questions in re analog CCTV signals

[denniscpearce]

at some point it has to stop being analog, so DSP is needed.
(company's site)

Re:Some questions in re analog CCTV signals

[denniscpearce]

hm fuck sorry i mean that is only going to work for ntsc, nothing really to do with the gp's post

Re:Some questions in re analog CCTV signals

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know the name of the standard used by an analog CCTV signal, and what specs a card a needs to meet so as to make sure that it will "see" an analog CCTV signal?

AFAIK, The analog signal for CCTV is known as "composite video," the same same stuff that comes out of the RCA video output jack an any consumer VCR or analog camera.

I have no idea why different capture cards would have a problem with it. I would think that any video capture card would work.

Hauppauge in demand?

[qualico]

There use to be lots of the 250's and 350's on eBay.
Not anymore. (gratefully I bought 3 of the "48432" versions for my Myth box.)

The 48432 is an OEM version that was bundled with HP boxes, if memory serves me.
This was causing some confusion for buyers, but was a great way to pickup a 250 for half the cost.
Hauppage forum

I would have liked to have seen a comparison of the entire Hauppauge lineup. There was a good link running around somewhere, anyone know of that page URL?

Re:Hauppauge in demand?

[enrico_suave]

I'm not sure which one you are thinking of, but ironcially on the same site you linked to SHSPVR there's a hauppauge model comparison page that helps distinguish visually/chipset wise (but not necessarily features/support) of the different hauppauge cards.

The pvr250's are pretty much EOL'd at this point. I know PCAlchemy has a few pvr250MCE's OEM's in stock but the pvr150's are cheaper.

(note: they sponsor my site, so make of that what you will)

*shrug*

e.

Different images

[AdamInParadise]

Their "tests" show different pictures for each card. How can they juge the picture quality if they do not show the same picture displayed by each card? The artefacts we see could be attributed to actual differences in the pictures. At least show me a video capture!

Those guys must have skipped Science 101.

Re:Different images

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, a real test would have compared the output of the cards vs. some reference MPEG2 decoder implementation, or at least (for large-field color fidelity) vs. a known input signal.

Saying that one card's colors are "too bright" doesn't mean anything unless you know what the actual result is supposed to be.

Re:Different images

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The test is flawed.. only uses one video as input (and it is an animation) and doesn't show the source picture before capture.

It is not appropriate to draw broad conclusions from such a test. At best, you could rank the cards for how well you *think* their image quality is for the Lion King.

Seriously though.. how many tests only use a single test case? The only ones that do are the ones trying to prove something, not actually review the field fairly. Makes me wonder who sponsored that article.

Re:Different images

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

the pictures are so similar it doesn't matter.

grab your camera... try to take a picture of your tv while watching your favorite show 3 times... keep in mind, the frame changes ever 24.999 seconds or so.

get the picture?

Well the specs

[fozzmeister]

for the Hauppage Nova-T says > 1Ghz or something like that, But I can use 2x cards on a 500Mhz AMD both recording and have less than 35% CPU usage. Quality is great as well.

I'm guessing Satellite Versions will take the same amount of CPU too.

Sasem USB HDTV

[Brian Stretch]

These things are great, but unfortunately, it looks like they're discontinuing them. It's looking doubtful that we'll see 64-bit WinXP drivers, much less Linux support. Too bad, because HDTV on widescreen notebooks looks great. 1680x1050 res is close enough to 1080i, and 1280x800 is the same width as 720p.

Sasem's site has a notice posted about the discontinuation, if anyone reads Korean.

Of course, you really need to be able to receive broadcast TV for HDTV tuner boxes/cards to be useful. Unencrypted digital cable TV channels are viewable, but broadcast works best. Plus it's free. I get better HDTV reception than analog TV broadcast.

MythTV experiance

[Schmots]

I love linux, even have my LPI level1, so of course I wanted to try to build a mythtv box. I bought a pvr-350, and even though I don't really like fedora I followed the instructions at www.wilsonet.com. It works great.. Here are my specs 256 megs of ram p2 400 I am using the hardware decoding which cancels out the ability to watch dvds on this box, but hey a p2 400 wouldn't handle that anyway. I have perfect tv playback and recording, without my processor hardly every droping below 85% idle. The system is wonderful and I suggest to anyone trying to build one of these systems on a low end box to get the pvr-350. If you happen to have a power house you can put it in.. a 1.5ghz or higher save some money and go with the pvr-250, your backups will take up half the space and your output should be just as nice. Plus you will get dvd playback and can use the other nice mythtv features such as mythmusic and mythgame

Re:MythTV experiance

[Gax]

"I am using the hardware decoding which cancels out the ability to watch dvds on this box, but hey a p2 400 wouldn't handle that anyway."

How odd. I had no problem watching DVDs on a P2 300 5 years ago using WinDVD. I even bought a Creative hardware decoder, but could never get it to work correctly without it putting out a massive amount of interference (probably a dodgy card, I couldn't find the receipt to return it).

Re:MythTV experiance

[Schmots]

Yes, I did have dvd playback with a hardware decoder on this same box and with powerdvd, what I ment was with linux's default dvd decoding since it is all reverse engineered.

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[Kiryat Malachi]

God yes, let's have FULL BITRATE VIDEO SITTING ON OUR DAMN HARD DRIVES. Speaking for myself, I don't feel like investing in an 80GB HDD for every hour of video I want to record (CCIR 601 digital video is roughly 90 GB per hour, using a 4:2:2 sampling scheme without any other compression - this is what most studios use).

MPEG-2 is good enough for DVD, and can be better than DVD if you run it at very low compression ratios. Good enough for DVD? Good enough for me.

Stay clear of Hauppauge USB

[smoker2]

I have a Hauppauge Nova USB -T which does digital terrestrial (in the UK at least).
It has PVR functions and pause of live tv etc. The only problem I have found is it sucks !
Getting it to work under linux is almost impossible, as it uses a different chipset to the standard analogue devices. As such, it is relegated to use on a Windows machine only. the supplied software *requires* both IE5 and WinDVD 4 to be installed for the tv to work at all. Removing ads is an exercise in futility, because, as the card records straight to mpeg2, if you take out the ads, then you have to resynch all the following recording. This is a problem that gets worse as the recording length increases.
Also, as I am running this on an old win98se box, I am limited to 4GB filesize. I can live with that as it has automatic file splitting, except, that when I try to use the separate pieces of the recording in software such as TMPGEnc DVD Author, I can't ! Only the first section of the file is recognised, and the rest is refused as being out of spec. Strangely, if I use another piece of software ( Womble mpeg editor IIRC ) to open and then save the same "out of spec" files (that's all, just open then save), TMPGEnc suddenly recognises the files ok.

Add to this the occasional IE "page not found" error in the TV interface (no, I'm not kidding), and you get an idea of the shite this program represents.
I did buy a PVR 350 originally, but it didn't work, so I RMA'd it and got this instead....foool.
I will be getting another PVR 350 as soon as funds allow, then I'll have to get a set top box for the digital broadcasts and feed that into the 350.
A large part of the decision to get the Nova-t was the fact that the uk authorities are going to start turning off analogue tv broadcasts as early as 2006, ie, next year, but if I can get a set top box feeding into the 350 then thats what I'll do.

Re:Stay clear of Hauppauge USB

[enrico_suave]

one suggestion... for MPEG2 editing that's quick/easy and doesn't suffer from loss of sync try videoredo

or MPEG2vcr by womble (?? I think something like that... google around)

It's worth a trial download at least to see if it's easier on you for cutting out commercials. IMHO. Although I have no idea if either product runs on Win98 or not.

good luck!

e.

Re:Stay clear of Hauppauge USB

[smoker2]

I think I did try videoredo, and the MPEG2vcr by womble was the software I mentioned in my post.
The audio synch problem was such that, if I removed the first set of ads from a 2 hour program, then the sound would be around 1 second out of synch. If I then removed the second set of ads (at around 30 minutes into the program) the sound would go around 1.5 seconds out from that point. And so on through the whole program. What was interesting was that this problem wasn't consistent. Some programs I could edit fine, and others were absolute pigs.
I really would prefer straight to avi recording rather than on the fly compression, and get back the control I used to have. Ok, it takes up more space, but I have a 200GB SATA drive sat here so thats no problem.

Low requirements?

[UnknowingFool]

Although video and tuner requirements are strict, MCE is less demanding of CPU power. Microsoft suggests a minimum processor of 1.6 GHz with at least 256MB of ram.

Anybody read this and think WTF? It's not demanding if you are buying a new machine to run MCE, but if you have an older one machine that you want to convert to be your media center, good luck with anything but a P4 or Athlon XP. With Linux and MythTV, you can get PIIIs and sometimes PIIs to work if you have a card with both hardware encoding and decoding capabilities.

Since Hauppauge is the veteran in this market, it will be interesting how the newer cards will fare in Linux machines. Although Hauppauge does not release Linux drivers themselves, they at least acknowlege that people are running Linux and provide you with a link. I don't know what the numbers are but I would think that a majority of people buying Hauppauge products run Linux.

nVidia and ATI might want to take that hint and release Linux drivers for the TV functions. Currently there are drivers for the video cards but the ones for the TV chips are not as mature.

UK Considerations

[zerosignal]

In the UK, digital TV is widely available over the air with both free channels and a small number of subscription ones. There are now several cards which can capture the MPEG2 stream directly from the broadcast, meaning no encoding and no quality loss. One such company selling these is Nebula Electronics.

Re:UK Considerations

[pklong]

Hauppauge also have a whole range of digital terrestrial receivers suitable for the UK. I have yet to see a board capable of receiving Topup-TV (the extra subscription channels).

I've seen Digital Satelite boards with a CAM slot. But for DVB-T, I'm still looking. Unless you know otherwise....

I'm guessing that the market for it would be so small it's not worth selling one.

Re:UK Considerations

[Anonymous Coward]

The newer versions of Nebula's software do support TopUp TV.

It requires a soft Seca CAM, and a Phoenix-type interface for your card.

I've not tried it, since I am not a top-up TV subscriber, but the features do seem to be present on Nebula's win32 software. No idea if/how this is supported under Linux.

conclusions not indicitive of capture quality

[CapnGib]

I don't know what MPEG-2 software decoder the tester used (I assume intervideo), but in my experience with PVR-250 on windows under SageTV, the software decoder has a HUGE impact on the video quality.

The bundled Intervideo decoder is pretty much crap and most people on the SageTV forums suggest the latest NVDVD decoder (which incidently comes with the eVGA card) for best quality. I personally used the Sonic decoder on my Hauppage card and the improvement over the stock on is like night and day.

Not to discount the merits of the other cards in the test, but the PVR-150 in this review is brought down because of the crappy software decoder they bundled it with. I wonder how the output of these cards would compare if used with the same NVDVD decoder?

Re:conclusions not indicitive of capture quality

[cbreaker]

Yea, you're right. If they wanted to do a real hardware review, they would have done that - to remove the software variable.

It was a very short little article and not nearly as well thought out of a review then they have over at Toms Hardware or Anandtech.

DV Capture with Tuner

[ashpool7]

These exist, just not for the PC. The Formac Studio TVR (http://www.formac.com) hooks up over FireWire, takes input from composite, cable, and SVideo, outputs via composite, cable (i think), and SVideo, and captures in DV.

It is, however, pretty expensive ($300).

Elgato makes one too, but last time I checked, the quality wasn't as good.
http://www.elgato.com

Re:DV Capture with Tuner

[martok]

I stand corrected, thanks. When you say this isn't for the PC, do you mean the PC would need a firewire card or it actually wouldn't work that way either?

Re:DV Capture with Tuner

[ashpool7]

The companies do not support Windows whatsoever.

With the tools available in the FireWire SDK for OS X, it is feasable to eavesdrop on communications to these devices in order to reverse engineer their protocol for creating device drivers. That is, if you're enterprising enough...

Re:DV Capture with Tuner

[radish]

Errm, I am no expert in this field, but a quick google turned up similar products (convert analogue video to DV) from a number of manufacturers:

ADS Pyro
Canopus ADVC series
DataVideo
Dazzle
Miglia
Snazzi
Sony
T erraTec

All of the one's I have listed claim Windows compatibility. Prices seem to range from $150 up. Now as I said, I'm no expert, so there may be something wrong with these products - but the Formac Studio product you mentioned is in the same list, so I'm guessing they're similar.

Re:DV Capture with Tuner

[martok]

Hmm, I'm going out of my element here but I wouldn't think a hardware specific driver should be necessary unless it's using some sort of nonstandard protocol. Linux for example supports dv capture devices using the dv1394 or raw1394 drivers. I don't think programs like dvgrab care whether you are using a DV capture card or a camcorder. That said, I can't speak to how Windows manages its firewire drivers.

Re:DV Capture with Tuner

[ashpool7]

I would think there would be some sort of protocol in order to start/stop recording, change inputs, change channels, etc.

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[pla]

If picture quality is your main concern, stay AWAY from any card that compresses it into mpeg2 for you.

Like people fanatically concerned about picture quality would feel even remotely happy with capturing broadcast (or even analogue CTV) NTSC?


These chips spit out raw, uncompressed video.

For all of us with RAIDs capable of writing 37MB/s sustained?

And what, exactly, does "raw" mean, anyway, when talking about converting what amounts to analog pulse intensities for an electron gun that happens to spray across three different colors of pixels (in a very irregular and poorly-reproduceable manner, varying not only from TV to TV but also from scanline to scanline on the exact same TV)?


I will agree with you on principal, but I have to suspect you just posted this for the sake of posting something, rather than to actually address a peeve of yours.

Does eVGA's $65 NVTV have Linux drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on people, this is Slashdot. Is it going to work with MythTV, or not?

Re:Does eVGA's $65 NVTV have Linux drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot? I thought I was on Slutdash... Damn this dyslexia!

Re:Does eVGA's $65 NVTV have Linux drivers?

[9mind]

No... says I who has been trying to fudge it for a month. The rivatv and nvtv driver support is whacked out right now.

For a Second Opinion See AnandTech

[Thomas Hawk]

Interestingly enough AnandTech is also out with a round up today. http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[Keruo]

bullshit

The cx88 cards you list are DVB(which is pretty much HDTV standard outside USA) cards and they spit out transport stream which is mpeg2.

The quality is superior compared to the crap analog cards featured here because the transmitted signal is digital, not analog.

Don't Look Down

[4of12]

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to call those MIT guys with the paper generator so we can start work in a random post generator.

Sounds to me like you've been had just like the conference organizers that accepted the random paper.

Slashdot has always had its share of random troll/disparagement/insult bots jumping out of the low score cesspool trying to get a response from a real person.

Just don't look down below into the festering fetid pool that is Score:0 posts replying to yours and you'll be fine.

Links???

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

You can also purchase external (and internal, I'm sure) capture devices that capture direct to .dv format.

Do you have any links? I'd be especially interested in a [barebones OEM] card that didn't cost like a gazillion dollars, where "a gazillion" is anything more than about, oh, say $49.95.

PS: In our case, the input signal would be Analog CCTV.

Re:Links???

[EggyToast]

These guys (ADS Tech) makes some -- they're external and FW and capture in DV format. I've found the one I linked to for as cheap as $150-ish, which is pretty good considering it has component inputs. I'm sure there are others out there that capture to dv format as well, though.

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[Andy Dodd]

I'm sorry, but NO.

If you dump raw unencoded video to your hard drive, you will be stressing its transfer capabilities to their limits and using obscene amounts of hard drive space.

If you encode the video, you lose quality anyway, and NOW you use a decent amount of CPU time to do so.

The hardware MPEG encoders used in these cards are designed specifically for encoding TV signals and do a VERY good job of it, and they have the added bonus of using almost no CPU whatsoever when recording. They also don't strain your hard drive at all, there are people who run 3-4 encoders simultaneously without any problems. In 99% of all situations, the limiting factor on your quality will be the input signal.

"dumb" TV capture cards are for the cheap/poor. Hell, they're not even for the cheap/poor because what you save on the card (getting to be less and less as time goes by - note the $70 price for the cards reviewed) will be made up for by your need to purchase a much more powerful CPU.

I wish I had mod points and there were a "-1 Moron" option...

Mac woefully under-represented

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that so far there's no such solution for the Mac. I've been using an iBook G4 as a media center for a year, with the Yamaha sound card, NEC VT-46 projector, and an external HD (IDE enclosure). I can watch pretty much anything on it, except HDTV.

Re:Mac woefully under-represented

[a984]

check out eyeTV 500, HDTV signals both over-the-air and unencrypted digital cable (QAM). No analog tuner, or direct analog input though. 3 times more expensive roughly.

What to buy

[halleluja]

I missed some cards in the lineup, esp. Matrox ?Marvel? series etc which are around quite some time.

Ye Olde BrookTree bt878 chipsets work perfectly for like 10 yrs. The public domain driver is more stable than the official :)

On the other hand, I would as well scoop up an SGI Indy and attach a 10000rpm scsi drive; my guess is it will outrun any current system (at least in price/quality)

HDTV

[OmniBeing]

I want HDTV tuners with digital cable capability. If I can get rid of my digital boxen that sit on our tv's, I'd be more than happy. After all, isn't the goal of all this to come up with a pvr that can give you high resolution porn on demand?

Re:HDTV

[halfelven]

Air2PC

Behind the curve

[As Seen On TV]

Isn't this kind of stuff obsolete now? Everybody's going to MPEG-4. Both cable and satellite providers are deploying MPEG-4 AVC (a.k.a. H.264) as we speak. Only terrestrial broadcasts will stay with MPEG-2, and that's only because ATSC won't tolerate a massive change to the standard they spent more than a decade writing.

And in regards to MythTV support...

[ikewillis]

The WinTV PVR 250/350 cards are supported by MythTV through the ivtv drivers: http://ivtv.sourceforge.net/

Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Andy Dodd]

Unless you want to run extremely low bitrates (fitting full-length movies on CDs, etc), MPEG4 has very few advantages over MPEG2. In fact, it has quite a few disadvantages.

1) Less hardware support. 95%+ of all DVD players out there do not have MPEG4 capability. But they all have MPEG2 capability, since DVD uses MPEG2.
In addition to DVD players, there are numerous MPEG2 hardware acceleration solutions for cheap low-cost low-power frontents, such as the Hauppauge MediaMVP, and the MPEG-2 acceleration capabilities of many Mini-ITX boards, along with hardware IDCT and hardware MoComp found in almost any video card.
2) Lower decoding complexity. Even without the advantage of highly available hardware acceleration, MPEG-2 requires much less CPU power to decode than MPEG-4

MPEG-4 has its advantages, but it's not always the right tool for the job. In the case of PVRs, it is definately not the right tool for the job.

Go buy a Hauppauge PVR-250 and any reasonably supported video card (GeForce 4MX boards are cheap, VERY well supported, and have excellent TV-out capability, as a result they're one of the most reccommended MythTV TV-output boards), and slap them in your choice of stable x86 system, basically any one will do. It'll work, and if you follow Jarod Wilson's MythTV guide with Fedora Core (Google it, it's also linked to from MythTV's site I believe.) it's easy to set up.

I agree the documentation is kind of crappy in some regards for MythTV... Jarod's HOWTO should be linked to in a more prominent location, plus MythTV's lead developer refuses to set up user support forums and/or even link to forums that anyone else sets up, resulting in a mailing list with such high volume that basically no one can keep up with the traffic. :(

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[BrookHarty]

If you plan to burn to DVD yes, mpeg-4 is a waste, but your using a computer to save to a file, and quailty and space, mpeg4 is better. And if you are only going to store the files, space wise, mpeg4 is much better.

Right now, the common size for a good quality divx tv show is 350 megs, you can fit alot of tv shows on 1 dvd. And there are DVD players that do Divx now. Or your MythTV should be able to play divx.

So Mpeg-4 is not a waste for me, and seems to be a very common question.

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

What s the difference between DivX and MPEG4? Is there a good site somewhere that explains all this crap to a codec newbie?

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[halfelven]

The file size argument is irrelevant, the price for blanc media is very low anyway, regardless of which format you're using.

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[BrookHarty]

The file size argument is irrelevant, the price for blanc media is very low anyway, regardless of which format you're using.

Anyone who says Size doesnt matter, is lieing.

BTW, DVD's are not cheap, unless you buy bulk oem 1-4x. DL, 8x, jeweled beefs up the cost. Then HD's take up ide ports, heat, and you can only have so many. Size does matter, and Mpeg4 is also better quality.

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lieing? You mean lying.

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your response to someone else is "You don't want what you want," how often do you think it's even remotely helpful?

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Andy Dodd]

Considering that hardware MPEG-4 encoders are nearly nonexistent even if you ignore the issue of Linux support, it's not surprising you're having problems finding MPEG-4 support. So you have three options:

a) Use a hardware MPEG-2 encoder at maximum bitrate and set MythTV to transcode to lower-bitrate MPEG-4 in non-realtime. This gives the benefit of allowing 2-pass encoding.
b) Attempt realtime software encoding. I believe NuppelVideo (which is what MythTV uses for software encoding) uses an MPEG-4 codec.
c) Wait. A long time. Looking at the detailed specs for Plextor's MPEG-4 encoder hardware (supposedly Linux drivers were just released for this recently), the device only supports CBR MPEG-4, not even MPEG-4 in ABR mode. MPEG-4 CBR has almost no advantage over VBR MPEG-2, and has not much advantage in ABR mode. To get good quality from MPEG-4 you need to use 2-pass encoding or constant-quantizer (aka constant-quality) encoding. Hardware encoders simply CANNOT support 2-pass encoding, and probably very few if any will ever support constant-quantizer encoding because it makes encoder buffer design MUCH more difficult. As such, it's going to be a LONG time before you see any hardware encoders that support CQ mode. In short, if you even remotely care about quality, MPEG-2 is going to beat MPEG-4 in any hardware-encoding-only situation with any currently available hardware, and it will likely stay that way for quite some time.

Once you start wanting to stream to lightweight frontends around the house (trust me, you'll want to do this once you start with Myth), you'll regret it if you're using MPEG-4 because it instantly increases the cost of any frontends you use.

And then there's HD - In this case you'll be using a transport-stream-capture device, and Myth supports both MPEG2-TS-over-1394 capture and the HD-3000 ATSC tuner card.

MPEG-4 simply does not belong in any PVR system at the current time due to the excessive encoding complexity needed for acceptable quality.

Re:Why the MPEG4 obsession?

[Rakarra]

In short, if you even remotely care about quality, MPEG-2 is going to beat MPEG-4 in any hardware-encoding-only situation with any currently available hardware, and it will likely stay that way for quite some time.

Also, if you plan to do any editing of the video before archiving it (say you only want an exerpt of the stream or you want to cut out commercials), MPEG-2 is much easier to edit (especially frame by frame!) than MPEG-4.

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[jtamplin]

Where exactly do you intend to get non-MPEG content? Satellite is delivered via MPEG2, digital cable is MPEG2, HTDV is MPEG2, and DVD is MPEG2.

Since I am quite certain you will agree HDTV is better quality than any NTSC analog signal you capture from analog cable or antennae, then perhaps the issue isn't using MPEG2 but rather what bitrate you use.

If you are recording more than one channel at a time, you will have difficulty building a disk array capable of keeping up with uncompressed D1 video, and you can forget uncompressed HD content with off-the-shelf hardware.

In my experience, MPEG2 at 6Mbps VBR has no noticeable loss of quality over any NTSC source. You can frequently get away with much less depending on the source material. So, I think the answer is to make sure that you choose the appropriate bitrate for your source material and your quality requirements and have a hardware encoder.

Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[billstewart]

I've got analog cable, and no plans to upgrade. Does this mean that I need to use an analog card like the Hauppage, and that if I had digital cable I'd need a digital card instead?

uncompressed DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. DVD is compressed (MPEG2 lossy compression).

MythTV...

[Plac3bo]

I did not RTA, but since you ask ...but does anyone have experience with the cards in MythTV? , I thought I'd throw in my two cents: I have been running MythTV on Gentoo w/ a AMD 2400 and the Hauppauge PVR 250 and the hardware encoding is great quality and fast. Overall the system runs very smoothly. If I was gonna rebuild the system, the only thing I'd do differently is choose a different filesystem, I'm currently using Reiser and while it is generally a fast filesystem, it is very sluggish when deleting files larger than a few gigabytes (a very common task with MythTV).

Re:MythTV...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a mythtv box based on FC3 with a PVR-350 card. Two words: it rocks.

For Linux newbies there are a ton of "how-to's" out there but they very quickly get outdated by patches, new versions, etc. I got very frustrated my first time due to a bad PVR card that had me chasing my tail for a few days. Jarod Wilson's guide is probably the best.

Re:MythTV...

[tardigrades]

what filesystem are you planning on using?

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[dark_requiem]

Most HDTV cards will tune OTA HDTV, but there is supposed to be some kind of protection on most cable HDTV transmission, with the exception of the "must-carry" stations (i.e. local broadcast stations), and those you can pick up with an antenna anyway. To my understanding, most HD channels on cable cannot be tuned by these things.

On a side note, for those of you looking for an HDTV card, be it for your computer or a MythTV box, DON'T BUY ATI!!! The ATI HDTV Wonder is the worst crap I've ever used. At present, the DTV app doesn't work at all, and there's a 1-second delay on analog inputs, rendering it useless for gaming (try playing Sonic when everything is delayed by a second). Tech support is useless, they've been having me do driver reinstalls for months now. They swore up and down that it is fully compatible with a 6600GT card, but obviously not...

Firewire, USB2?

[phorm]

A comment has already been made about USB 2 cards, but how about firewire. Both my laptop and my portable (Epia-M10000) have USB2 and Firewire ports.

Does anyone know what would be the best card out of those worlds (are firewire better than USB 2)... on a cost VS quality comparison. Mostly they'll probably be used for helping to convert my old VHS video collection into DVD format, and perhaps some PVR-type stuff.

PCI cards are nice... but of course they don't go in my laptop.

Re:Firewire, USB2?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FireDTV seems to be cool. I'd like to get one, but alas, they are AU$400. http://www.longblack.com.au/product_info.php?cPath =32_65&products_id=790&osCsid=ea28fe62a5dede0ec2a5 d6f4b9d4b47b/

Re:purple

[taniwha]

no it's die in the board stock, a pretty standard sort of option these days, we sometimes use colors to distinguish different prototypes

err ...

[taniwha]

that should be "dye in the board stock"

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[enrico_suave]

" I've got analog cable, and no plans to upgrade. Does this mean that I need to use an analog card like the Hauppage, and that if I had digital cable I'd need a digital card instead?"

For analog cable you certainly could/would use an analog card like one of the hauppauges.

FWIW: There's not such thing as a digital cable PC card (for the most part -- there's an HDTV card or two that will do unencrypted QAM but that's kinda a cable system crapshoot/roulette and I'd be surprised if the good digital cable channels were unencrypted). If you had digital cable you'd need the digital cable STB and take it's analog output and run it to through the an analog tuner/encoder's video/audio in (again like the hauppauge cards) and use an IR blaster to have the PC control the digital cable set top box.

E.

Yea, S-Video is the way to go

[cbreaker]

S-Video is amazingly better then standard composite. It's unreal.

I had everything going through my Stereo before, which is an older unit that only has standard RCA composite jacks. I mean, it looks okay. But when I hook up the computer's output to it, it looks very junky.

I hooked it up S-Video and it's just great. So I got a switch-box, with a remote control, for 5 S-Video inputs and two outputs. Everything but the VCR supports S-Video now so it's great!

The new fancy digital connectors and digital signals for the new equipment will be great but it's prohibitively expensive at this point. I always hated that about home electronics - it's not new tech (Computers been doing all this digital stuff for a long time now) yet it's priced like it is.

I want to get a PVR-250, you got it running with Myth? It working good for you?

Hauppauge image quality

[amigabill]

I agree with the article's comments on Hauppauge image quality. I have a PVR-250 (before they added the MCE part) and see much of the same artifacting mentioned in the article. I was disappointed with that. I haven't seen it running on Windows though, only Linux with the ivtv driver.

I've since bought a pcHDTV-3000 card. Haven't got it running jsut yet due to lack of time, but hopefully I'll be happier with this one.

Anyone know if there are good Linux drivers for the better cards reviewed here?

Highly questionable testing methodology

[Da_Biz]

The way they tested the quality of the video was HIGHLY questionable, IMHO.

I would have preferred that they use color bars and other reference standards that are relied upon by broadcasters and videographers.

For example, these DVDs:
http://www.videoessentials.com

Also, they don't mention whether or not the monitor (TV or otherwise) they were using was calibrated. Quite frankly, it's possible that the color looked better simply because the video card was outputting a signal that was more amenable to the display device.

I worked with an engineering team that was working on broadcast-quality MPEG-2 streaming. They used things like Tektronix PQA picture quality analyzers, which are far more "objective."

While people should certainly adjust their TV settings (hue, saturation, contrast) to their taste, video testing should use better selection in content being analyzed, and be standards based. I'm sure that broadcast engineers reading this are rolling their eyes over the test methodology.

By no means an exhaustive list

[ashpool7]

I just have experience with the Mac products.

The Canopus products are top notch, but the really good ones are more expensive than those I listed, which is why I forgot about them.

Re:By no means an exhaustive list

[TheGratefulNet]

I use a canopus analog->dv box. works great!

but is windows only, so far ;(

still, its novel in that it lets you import AND export via firewire to analog tv. you can place the box near your tv (short analog cables) and then run a LONG firewire cable to the pc which is most likely NOT right next to your tv.

audio sync (problem with most boxes) works Just Great(tm) with canopus. can also disable macrovision by holding the power button in for a long time at power up (30 secs or something?).

so far, I use the canopus advc-100 (model num might be wrong, but its the 100 model) to import analog video into my pc as DV (avi) files. then with TMPGEnc (software encoder) to encode to dvd/mp2. best combo I've found so far for quality.

pvr 250 mythTv

[broschb]

I have a MythTv system up and running with a hauppauge 250. The quality that I get on my system looks better than that of the test. It was fairly easy to set up, and the IVTV drivers work well and are constantly improving. I have this running on an old athlon 850, with 256MB and it handles it very well.

Hauppauge

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pronnounced "hop-hog" for those of you who didn't know. I've had bad hop-hog USB experiences before.
My two-sense.

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[Detritus]

You may get "upgraded" to digital cable whether you like it or not. Digital cable makes much more efficient use of the bandwidth on the cable distribution system. Some cable companies have said that they plan to remove all of the analog channels from their systems. They are waiting for digital STB prices to fall to the point where they can afford to give them away to their analog customers.

Maybe because it doesn't have a "channel"?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

I have no idea why different capture cards would have a problem with it. I would think that any video capture card would work.

My impression is that analog CCTV doesn't have a "channel" [e.g. WCBS New York Channel 2, WNBC New York Channel 4, WABC New York Channel 7, etc].

It seems as though the default Hauppauge software package can't see analog signals unless they have a "channel".

Re:Maybe because it doesn't have a "channel"?

[Anonymous Coward]

My impression is that analog CCTV doesn't have a "channel" [e.g. WCBS New York Channel 2, WNBC New York Channel 4, WABC New York Channel 7, etc]. It seems as though the default Hauppauge software package can't see analog signals unless they have a "channel".

The "channel" signal is RF (Radio Frequency), which is the stuff that goes into and comes out the threaded 'F' antenna connector on a TV or consumer VCR.

You're just using an "over the air" tuner card when you want a video capture card.

Google... Here ya go: A list of composite video capture cards Note the "composite video input" filter." In the "Features" column here what you want is listed here as "Analog VideoIn" vs. "tuner," which is what you've got.

Google or Froogle for more. You're welcome.

doesn't make sense

[halfelven]

There are already many analog-to-DV hardware converters, but those have a different market as a target - amateur, semi-pro and pro movie making.

The MPEG2 cards are just for capturing TV shows. They use MPEG2 because the majority of their users tend to create DVDs out of those shows - hence, the cards create the capture files directly in DVD-compatible MPEG2.

wrong!

[halfelven]

How come this comment was rated Interesting? It's wrong!

All the DV and mini-DV camcorders on the market write DV content on the tapes, not raw video! Sure, it's not a .dv file, but the video stream is already encoded with the DV codec (pretty similar to MJPEG). The encapsulation (on-disk and on-tape format) does not matter, it's the video/audio codecs that matter.

Want proof? (aside from reading up the existing documentation on the Internet) The capacity of a 60 minutes mini-DV tape is about 12...15GB (i forgot the exact value). When you save to your computer an hour's worth of footage over FireWire, how big is the file? You bet, it's 12...15GB.

Re:wrong!

[Viceice]

This makes me wonder if it's possible to mount the tape in a DV camcorder and use it as a cost effective way of doing tape backup...

Re:wrong!

[fimbles]

Look at dvbackup project

Hauppauge violates GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.busybox.net/shame.html

The busybox website claims that Hauppauge includes this GPL software in their product but does not comply with the GPL. The website has these two lines as of today:
--
Hauppauge Media MVP
Hauppauge contacted me on 16 Dec 2003, and claims to be working on resolving this problem.
--

Since there is nothing more, we can assume that Hauppage has not satisfactorily resolved this problem. Therefore, DO NOT BUY HAUPPAUGE. Furthermore, try to let them know why you will not by their product.

Re:Hauppauge violates GPL

[Giggle Stick]

That seems like a rather large assumption. There are plenty of lazy people out there that might not update something like this, and who knows of the validity of their claim in the first place. Open source supports can be wrong sometimes too. This is over a year old now, with no updates. Maybe the busybox people found out they were wrong and forgot to update this page.

not really

[halfelven]

There's an extremely large installed base of DVD players which, all of them, are based on MPEG2. These cards encode directly to MPEG2 (actually, DVD-compatible MPEG2) because most of their users tend to record shows just to burn them to DVDs.
Capturing to MPEG4, then transcoding to MPEG2 will induce quality loss.
Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.

And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that. Hence, MPEG2.

Re:not really

[As Seen On TV]

Also, the typical DVD MPEG2 bitrate is high enough so that there's essentialy no quality loss when encoding a typical TV show to DVD/MPEG2.

You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.

And no, the majority of normal people do not watch recorded TV shows on computers (where MPEG4 might make sense), they use DVD players for that.

Well, no, that's not really right, is it? Nobody actually records programming to DVD then watches it. Instead, they watch recorded programming via a PVR-type interface. In that case, MPEG-4 AVC makes perfect sense. Higher quality at lower bit rates. You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps.

Re:not really

[halfelven]

You must still be living in a low-definition world. Come join us in the 21st century, then see how your precious MPEG-2 holds up.

It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution. :-P

In any case, you seem to speak about future trends, i was speaking about the current situation. The manufacturers of those cards simply looked at the market NOW and made a decision. The decision was to go with MPEG2. It makes sense NOW.
Perhaps in the future the decision to use something else would make more sense.

You can store really spectacular program quality at as low as 8 Mbps; with MPEG-2, comparable program quality costs you 20 or 25 Mbps

You're either living in an ivory tower, or had the misfortune of using really crappy encoders.
10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV, if you use decent encoders. I watch a lot of 10Mbps MPEG2 content on TV and there's no quality loss that can be perceived; i also watch it on a high-quality computer monitor (the likes used by movie makers, it's an SGI monitor) and the artifacts cannot be seen when watching the show normally (yes, if you switch into hyper-analytical mode, they are visible, but if you're watching the SHOW, not the IMAGE, they simply vanish).

I have a feeling that this discussion could continue indefinitely, since i am speaking about reasonable decisions, while you seem to belong to the Seeker Of Perfection category (which seems quite populous in the "multimedia geek" group).

Re:not really

[As Seen On TV]

It holds up pretty well, thanks, it's currently being used for HDTV distribution.

Only at 20 Mbps or higher, which is completely impractical for all purposes but terrestrial broadcast. There's just not enough bandwidth to dedicate 20 Mbps to each and every channel.

10Mbps MPEG2 is pretty good for typical DVD content, or typical NTSC TV

Which would be fine if anybody were still creating content at those resolutions. I'm going to say it again: Come join us in the 21st century.

hVCplus for non BT8xx TV cards?

[grolschie]

[not offtopic]
Any one get such an app to work on an ATI Radeon 8500DV which has a Philips chipset and WDM drivers? I get an error saying "video device already in use" whenever I try an run any such app including hVCplus, FreeTV, etc, etc.

Picture quality

[jreberry]

I own two PVR250's, and that's the worst image quality I've ever seen. Most HTPC users like to tinker a lot, and know that the first thing you need to do after installing a 250 is to make a few registry changes. There are lots of guides on the web describing how to do so. This makes the image quality on par with the cable going straight to your TV**. However, even BEFORE making these changes, the picture quality shouldn't be as bad as shown in the review. I'm not sure what, but something was wrong with their setup. Before I get jumped on about owning a 250 and complaining about the represented image quality of a 150, the cards are almost identical, and similar registry changes should be made for the 150 as well. **for the average user. Granted, if you work in Television your eyes get trained to look for certain things. I can tell a very small difference between the two, but I have to actively look for it. My girlfriend and friends cannot. Kind of like comparing an MP3 to a CD, at a decent bitrate most people can't actually tell a difference. Someone with a trained ear can.

Re:Picture quality

[jreberry]

To clarify more, look at the image quality at this link... http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393 &p=8 ...This is much closer to what the card actually does. Yes, the picture looks a bit fuzzy on your computer monitor, but that's because it's a SDTV signal. I understand that in this review the 250 still was only second place, but I'm not complaining about that. I'm complaining about the horrible quality represented from the Lion King in the first review. This is much more realistic.

Re:Why not try a PCI Nova-T then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not get a PCI Nova-T instead? I'm running one with no problems under MythTV 0.16, 2.6.10 kernel and FC2, along with a PVR-350.

Getting a setup top box (50quid) and a PVR-350 (100quid) to enable you to record the digital signal from the STB through the analoue tuner of the 350 seems misguided, and will seriously degrade quality.

Get a PCI Nova-T DVB card, and use it to dump the MPEG2 transmission to your disk. Quality is far far superior to using the 350 for the task, as the quality is as broadcast and no recompression is needed.

The very reason I have both a Nova-T and PVR350 in my Myth box is to allow crystal clear DVB recordings through the Nova-T and very decent MPEG2 recording through my ntl: box connected via svideo to the 350, controlled via lirc. I also use the PVR-350 as an output device, which uses the onboard MPEG2 decoder and drives an X display. If you are just wanting to record MPEG2, go for the cheaper PVR-250 card, without the decoder facility.

For cutting and remuxing MPEG2 streams, which seems to be no small task, try out the following (Windows)

ProjectX - for demuxing and fixing MPEG2 streams
Cuttermaran - for editing and joining MPEG2 streams

Both of these are free, and worth the purchase price in full.

DrWeesh

Decent PVR software that burns to DVD

[grolschie]

Does such an app exist? Drawbacks?

SLIGHTLY???

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you're just SLIGHTLY blind! It's a WORLD of difference. I cannot stand the crappy quaity analog captures, it looks like crap. The DVD burner is useless too, no way it's worth burning that crap, you couldn't pay me enough to watch it.

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[radarsat1]

that'll make everyone who paid "extra" for digital feel pretty stupid, huh? ;-)

i suppose it's more likely they make it an excuse to jack up the rates all around.

No it isn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog capturing looks like crap, but people will fight to build systems that use it. Satellite PVRs loose no quality whatsoever, the picture quality difference is just unbelieveable. It looks like twice as good.

Analog capturing is for the dogs

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody who isn't blind and cares to have a watcheable picture doesn't do analog captures. We're not far from VHS quality...

Many Factors affect quality.

[rips123]

I run MythTV on a PC with two cheap tuner cards in it - one analogue, one digital (DVB-T). The analogue one uses the standard tuner/bt878 chipset combo. I'm not sure about the DVB one.

The PCI bus seems to have major effects on reception for the analogue card. Any activity on the bus causes noise in the image. I had much success in improving the quality of the picture by changing PCI latency and clockspeed settings in my BIOS.

Also, disk activity (it seems seeking predominately) causes major reception artifacts.

In the end, I gave up on analogue transmissions and just use the DVB card since, in Australia, all free to air stations also broadcast in digital.

Re:Many Factors affect quality.

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like you have done exactly what I am thinking of doing; DVB-T card with MythTV in Australia. I wish there was some way I could email you offline to ask your (experience based) opinion on some ideas I have.

You're stupid, that's the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

DVB-* cards have picture quality that blow analog capturing. There is NO QUALITY LOSS - WHATSOEVER! It's the only capturing that's actually watcheable.

People with DVB cards usually pick a good program: VDR, MyTheatre, ProgDVB, DVB Dream, .... there's TONS of them, some being free. You decided to stick with the crappy one and complain about the bundled software. That's like people saying their analog card sucks because of the program that came with it (if anything came with it at all).

As for the "exercise in futility" that the card "records" in mpeg2, again, it's just you. The signal is broadcasted in mpeg2 and is recorded as is, bit for bit. Were you doing crappy analog capture, you'd have a shitty signal being captured, filtered, sampled, butchered, encoded, and finally compressed right to mpeg2 anyways. End result is the same, but without the quality. Neither mpeg2 file is hard to edit, it's just that you don't know how. I cut ads just fine everyday (funnily, with Womble MPEGVCR - never had a problem), and never had "out of spec" errors or such.

Then you blame the 4GB limit still making it sound somehow like it's the cards' fault that you're running a crappy outdated shitty OS. Not like analog capturing would be easier - much the inverse, the files are MUCH bigger if you're doing analog capturing, and quality much worse.

Yes, do get something that will hold your hand. You have the MUCH superior product, and blame your own problems and misunderstandings on it. Good job at dissing a vastly superior product.

Brilliant!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course we should compare cards based on the size of their PCB! Let's throw in flotation and taste tests for good measure =)

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[Rakarra]

Digital cable makes much more efficient use of the bandwidth on the cable distribution system.

Translation: It gets so compressed so much that the quality is actually less than that of analog cable. Or at least that's how it worked here in California with Comcast.

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[Detritus]

It doesn't have to be that way. They can put 39 Mbps of data on each 6 MHz digital channel. That's enough for 2 or 3 HD video streams, or a bunch of high quality SD video streams.

My local PBS stations multiplex multiple SD programs on a 19 Mbps over-the-air channel during the day. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the video.

Regular TV viewing

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I just want to watch regular TV on my computer? What kind of card should I get?

Re:Regular TV viewing

[unitron]

" What if I just want to watch regular TV on my computer? What kind of card should I get?"

Well if you don't care about your desktop being restricted to 800 x 600 you can use one of the old ATI All-In-Wonder cards (at least with W95 or 98).

Cable used in tests?!

[nmg196]

The ghosting and wave patterns on those screen grabs look to me like classic symptoms of using a really shit cable. What the hell is this guy using as his video cable? I hope he's not trying to compare the quality of video cards using a £5/$5 scart cable he bought from a supermarket? The difference a decent £40 scart lead makes is astonding.

Look down the left hand side of all the screen grabs - you won't get any of those signal reflection problems with a decent cable.

Re:Cable used in tests?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog cable sucks so bad, the limitation is definately NOT the cabling here. Plus, analog capturing makes it looks that much worse. If you're into crap, this is the perfect combo. That cables you use is irrelevant, it'll look like crap regardless.

THANKS!!!

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

You're welcome.

THANKS!!!

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[ChrisMaple]

CCIR must be oversampled and the 4:2:2 format inefficient. Broadcast NTSC TV's video bandwidth is about 5 MHz. 8 bit (1 byte) samples yield 50 dB S/N. 2 x 5e6 x 3600 = 36 GB/hr. Strip out blanking times (multiply by 0.82) to get 30 GB/hr.

Re:Digital vs. Analog? When do you need which one?

[Rakarra]

It doesn't have to be that way.

Well sure it doesn't have to be that way (I've heard DirecTV looks pretty good), but the temptation is always there. Cable companies try to squeeze in just a liiiittle bit more.. maybe another channel here or there. I like that analog cable doesn't give them as many options. They have fewer ways to screw it up.

Re:MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs.

[Kiryat Malachi]

Congratulations, you're an idiot who misses the point. Broadcast NTSC is crap quality. Further, if the *bandwidth* is 5 MHz (it isn't, actually, but close enough), how fast do you have to sample? Answer? 2*BW. Nyquist. 60 GB/hr. Still way too much. I win. Blanking data is actually 8%, not 18% (21 lines of VBI, 262.5 lines per field, 8%), meaning that it's actually going to be closer to 66 GB/hr, but either way, way too much.

Next, NTSC only broadcasts 4:2:0 (this is not, technically true, due to analog vs. digital differences, but it is close enough for now - suffice to say, color resolution in NTSC is roughly half that of luminance resolution) but people worried about quality know that *capturing* at 4:2:0 will produces all sorts of degradations; capturing at 4:2:2 is really necessary to sample NTSC broadcast analog video without loss of quality.

CCIR is a studio format, used before broadcast, and is much higher quality than bNTSC. If you want to talk about the errors compression induces, then obviously you're going to capture at the highest possible quality, right? And the highest possible quality is *not* broadcast NTSC, especially as non-broadcast sources like DirectTV become more and more prevalent.