Wow, stop posting on this article, it's way old!:-) There's a DivX.com forum where we hang out if you have more questions.
Sony doesn't release the datasheets for the tuner modules in the TV402U. The PAL tuner is totally different than the NTSC tuner. But we're testing the PAL tuner support right now and hope to release it early next week.
I can't believe anybody is still posting to this or I would have responded sooner. Anyway.
Yes, there's VBI support in the hardware. The SAA7115 sends the sliced data to the encoder, which passes it though verbatim to the host, so basically any format the SAA7115 recognizes can be decoded.
VBI is on the list of stuff to implement in the driver, I just haven't got to it yet. I hang out on the V4L mailing list if you have more questions about it.
You're in luck. If you want to run OS X on your Mac, Plextor sells a TV402U Mac bundle that comes with the EyeTV PVR software. If you want to run Linux on your Mac, the new Linux drivers support PPC and other big-endian systems just fine.
I wouldn't recommend it, but we've had 48 of these encoders running simultaneously at 1 Mbps each on a single USB controller. That's with no audio though, so it's not a useful measurement for a PVR.
Yes, the PAL model will do stereo (A2, NICAM, etc), I just haven't written the support for it yet. Similarly with VBI, although it's also coming. (Incidentally, teletext support has nothing to do with stereo reception in the audio decoder other than the fact that they're both "fringe" features that are often omitted from cheap products.)
Everything that comes out of this box conforms to an ISO standard. If the software takes the MPEG4 output and packages it in an AVI with MP3 video, then you have a DivX file. But the hardware itself doesn't output any proprietary video formats.
The encoder is the WIS G07007SB and the board is based on a WIS reference design with improvements made in-house by Plextor. Both the hardware and the Linux drivers are quite stable.
There are three models of the TV402U: North America, Europe (PAL) and Japan. The difference is the frequency bands that the tuner can receive. Only the NA tuner is supported currently but we'll add support for the PAL and Japan tuners in the next couple weeks.
The M402U is just like the TV402U but without a tuner, and it's also supported in Linux. Both of these devices can accept NTSC or PAL baseband inputs on the S-Video and Composite ports, regardless of the frequency bands the on-board tuner supports.
See the link in my previous post. USB 1.1 has a maximum transfer rate of 12 Mbps which is much too low for any useful video streams, so when the USB spec was written nobody really thought it would be used for webcams at all. Unfortunately the ubiquity of USB made USB webcams inevitable, so here we are.
I'll throw in with the Firewire crowd. IIDC cams are the way to go for compatibility and performance. The IIDC device class is standardized so the same kernel module works with any Fireware cam.
As far as image quality, the best cam I've seen (for a reasonable price) is the Unibrain Fire-i. It works better in low-light situations than any other webcam I've tried.
I've posted a bit of general information on webcam hardware on my webpage, if you want an introduction to the different options you have under Linux. It's a bit dated but mostly still relevant.
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lets just hope they don't set passwd as p455w0rd
Hmm, that wouldn't be anything like setting the Minuteman launch codes to 00000000, would it?
Wow, stop posting on this article, it's way old! :-) There's a DivX.com forum where we hang out if you have more questions.
Sony doesn't release the datasheets for the tuner modules in the TV402U. The PAL tuner is totally different than the NTSC tuner. But we're testing the PAL tuner support right now and hope to release it early next week.
I can't believe anybody is still posting to this or I would have responded sooner. Anyway.
Yes, there's VBI support in the hardware. The SAA7115 sends the sliced data to the encoder, which passes it though verbatim to the host, so basically any format the SAA7115 recognizes can be decoded.
VBI is on the list of stuff to implement in the driver, I just haven't got to it yet. I hang out on the V4L mailing list if you have more questions about it.
You're in luck. If you want to run OS X on your Mac, Plextor sells a TV402U Mac bundle that comes with the EyeTV PVR software. If you want to run Linux on your Mac, the new Linux drivers support PPC and other big-endian systems just fine.
I wouldn't recommend it, but we've had 48 of these encoders running simultaneously at 1 Mbps each on a single USB controller. That's with no audio though, so it's not a useful measurement for a PVR.
Isn't that a VBI service? VBI isn't supported yet but it's coming...
Yes, the PAL model will do stereo (A2, NICAM, etc), I just haven't written the support for it yet. Similarly with VBI, although it's also coming. (Incidentally, teletext support has nothing to do with stereo reception in the audio decoder other than the fact that they're both "fringe" features that are often omitted from cheap products.)
Everything that comes out of this box conforms to an ISO standard. If the software takes the MPEG4 output and packages it in an AVI with MP3 video, then you have a DivX file. But the hardware itself doesn't output any proprietary video formats.
The encoder is the WIS G07007SB and the board is based on a WIS reference design with improvements made in-house by Plextor. Both the hardware and the Linux drivers are quite stable.
There are three models of the TV402U: North America, Europe (PAL) and Japan. The difference is the frequency bands that the tuner can receive. Only the NA tuner is supported currently but we'll add support for the PAL and Japan tuners in the next couple weeks.
The M402U is just like the TV402U but without a tuner, and it's also supported in Linux. Both of these devices can accept NTSC or PAL baseband inputs on the S-Video and Composite ports, regardless of the frequency bands the on-board tuner supports.
See the link in my previous post. USB 1.1 has a maximum transfer rate of 12 Mbps which is much too low for any useful video streams, so when the USB spec was written nobody really thought it would be used for webcams at all. Unfortunately the ubiquity of USB made USB webcams inevitable, so here we are.
I'll throw in with the Firewire crowd. IIDC cams are the way to go for compatibility and performance. The IIDC device class is standardized so the same kernel module works with any Fireware cam.
As far as image quality, the best cam I've seen (for a reasonable price) is the Unibrain Fire-i. It works better in low-light situations than any other webcam I've tried.
I've posted a bit of general information on webcam hardware on my webpage, if you want an introduction to the different options you have under Linux. It's a bit dated but mostly still relevant.