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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?"
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"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."
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.
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Other capture cards are not as well supported as the Hauppauge cards.
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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.
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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)).
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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.
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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.
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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.
STFU about slashdot bias.
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
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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...
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).
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.
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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!
-- null
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.
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?
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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
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.
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.
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- 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.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.
Look at dvbackup project