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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?"
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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 ?
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
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.
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
They reviewed 6 boards, and came to a different conclusion: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2393
-- Andyvan
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Come on people, this is Slashdot. Is it going to work with MythTV, or not?
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.
How come this comment was rated Interesting? It's wrong!
.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.
All the DV and mini-DV camcorders on the market write DV content on the tapes, not raw video! Sure, it's not a
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.