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