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