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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?"
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.
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.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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)
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.
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.
Nobox: Only simple products.
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.
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?