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Television Media

Uncompressed TV Video Over USB 2.0 from ATI 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the want-to-build-a-mythtv-box dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wanted to watch TV on your notebook computer? Well, you used to be stuck with an external TV tuner that will usually compress the video so much to squeeze it down the USB interface, that it's not worth watching. But the new ATI TV Wonder manages to push uncompressed video down the USB 2.0 interface, producing superb image quality. It also comes with ATI's suite of multimedia applications and utilities. The reviewer reckons it's a great unit, although a little bit on the expensive side."
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Uncompressed TV Video Over USB 2.0 from ATI More

Uncompressed TV Video Over USB 2.0 from ATI

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  • Dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:22AM (#10276224)
    See this story [slashdot.org].

    *Sighs for some dupe checking*

    • Re:Dupe (Score:4, Funny)

      by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:25AM (#10276252) Homepage
      And it was already boring the first time. ;-/

    • Re:Dupe (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      this one has the better write-up, though. let's pretend the original story doesn't exist, and keep this one.

    • Re:Dupe (Score:5, Funny)

      by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:51AM (#10276480) Homepage Journal
      Sure... duping happens. Sure... I can understand it happening even as frequent as it does. with all of the Mods and such. But notice it is almost ALWAYS CmdrTaco.

      On a slightly unrelated note, expect to see this modded into the ground, right before my account becomes mysteriously banned.

  • Nothing for you to see here. Move along. (Score:5, Funny)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:23AM (#10276233) Journal
    Generally the problem is that the TV signal is not worth watching before any compression.

    (Oddly, /. itself at first thought that I should not see this article either...)

    • Generally the problem is that the TV signal is not worth watching before any compression.

      Ah - you have hit upon one of my pet projects. Most tv isn't worth watching at all. Some tv has good parts and bad parts, and this is the best tv you can find. If you could cut out the bad parts of tv episodes, and maybe reorder some scenes or something, you could compress shows down to vastly reduced, and concentrated hits of completely awesome. For example, imagine taking Babylon 5 and cutting enough to get i
      • What I'd like most in a PVR is a system allowing pitch-corrected speedup. Some shows I want to watch in real time, others I'd like pumped at least a few percent faster.

        (In addition to the other things you name, like cutting out the junk ;))

        timothy
      • As long as you leave in the part where Kosh tells Captain Sheridan "JUMP! JUMP! NOW!" and the part where Commander Ivanova is yelling "Boom Shakalala Boom" while she is 'fucking' that alien ambassador dude, I'm with you.

    • Also with the UK and most European countries havign far superior Digital Terestrial networks, WHY ANALOGUE? these units are already old technology!

      Why have an expensive brick, decoding 5 channels (UK) of analogue signals into what is basically a framebuffer, digitising it, sending it uncompressed through the USB2, then if you wish to record the laptop then has to recode it into MPEG1/MPEG2/Whatever?

      A Better product will receive the 40+ digital channels (UK) send the raw MPEG2 stream direct to the laptop,

  • the answer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slashpot ( 11017 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:23AM (#10276234)
    "Ever wanted to watch TV on your notebook computer?"

    No. I get too much tv shoved in my face in restraunts, coffee houses, gas stations, and walking down the sidewalk as it is.

  • No such limit. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by seebs ( 15766 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:24AM (#10276244) Homepage
    My ThinkPad A31p has video inputs.

    Of course, to actually WATCH the TV input, you need software. Contrary to popular belief, Cyberlink PowerVCR is teh sux0r, and no amount of fidgeting was ever able to get it to synchronize the signal correctly; their support staff said to "check that my video driver was current", and I eventually gave up and got a refund. Capturix Video Suite worked fine, though.

    The GATOS and related projects which were once working on this seem to have silently disintegrated without touching XF86 4.4.x, although it could be that there's some kind of support and I just have no clue where to find documentation. But... No external dongle, and it's a laptop with video in.

    Not to say it's COMMON, mind you, but it does exist.

    (The A31p was the Best Laptop Ever, and I wish IBM would sell something at least COMPARABLE to it, but nothing in their current lineup can match the three-spindle monster machine. Curious tidbit: Although it's not in the official specs, an A31p can have 2GB of memory!)
    • IIRC, the GATOS guys are now working directly with X.org

      Hence the reason the project seems to have disintegrated. /. should have the story in archives.

    • Re:No such limit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dslbrian ( 318993 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @11:02AM (#10276576)

      their support staff said to "check that my video driver was current", and I eventually gave up and got a refund.

      Speaking of drivers, its too bad this thing is from ATI because it means the drivers will blow. I've already been burned a couple times by ATI cards with their POS drivers. One card I got had a TV tuner, but for that card ATI -never- managed to release a fully functional driver on Windows, much less anything else. When I called in to tech support for help, their proposed solution was to reformat the drive, reinstall windows, and try the crappy drivers again... yeah, thanks for nothing... only a year or so later did I manage to pull it out of the bottom of a box and get it semi-functional under linux using the xawtv stuff (which frankly says something about ATI's incompetence in that the only drivers that ever worked were written by a 3rd party on an OS they don't support). For specialty stuff like this drivers are everything, and I have no faith in ATI when it comes to that (esp under linux).

  • ATI, please make a Mac version! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by green pizza ( 159161 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:25AM (#10276250) Homepage
    My PowerBook and I would love this! Finally something to make use of those USB 2.0 ports. With FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, I haven't had a need to buy any gear that makes use of anything faster than USB 1.1.

    Plus using my existing laptop as a tuner+PVR would be awesome!

  • What type of tuner (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:25AM (#10276253)
    is this, TV only or is it Cable as well. Potential problem, even if it has cable capabilities is that cable companies are moving towards all digital, where you must use thier boxes. However, presently (at least in MD) you can still get the old signal. FREE (don't tell Comcast), if you have broadband
    • Hehehe - happened to a friend of mine too - he wanted an internet connection without cable. He got cable anyway :)
    • I thought getting basic cable with cable internet was intended to be a selling point, not an unintended feature.
    • My guess is comcast does not care. Time Warner will do a Roadrunner only install, but they charge you THE SAME price as if you paid for both the TV ands Cable Modem. So really, to them, they are getting the same amount of money.
      • Of course they don't care. In fact, it's one less thing that the tech has to do during the install.

        *YOU* will care when you have to pay for the services they claim you were stealing because one of their outsourced techs didn't do his job.
      • Comcast gives you $10 off the $60/mo cable modem service if you also have some type of cable TV.

    • Re:What type of tuner (Score:3, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      However, presently (at least in MD) you can still get the old signal. FREE (don't tell Comcast), if you have broadband.

      Just wait until they do an audit (especially if you were previously an AT&T customer) and they find that you are using an unfiltered line for free...

      First is a warning on your door. They tag it and say that they did an audit and found you were stealing cable (not their exact words but their tone does come off as if they are saying that). They claim they will come back and check in
      • About two months ago, our "free basic cable" died. I was home that day, and a comcast van pulls in the driveway. 15 minutes later, there is a red-stickered filter on the line, at the top of the pole. Only the Country Music channel (CMT) works... aagh. I'm not sure if that was intentional, or if it just happens to be near enough the frequency of the cable modem.

        Never had them accuse me of stealing cable though.

        Within a day, had the satellite recievers out of the closet, and back in action. Just wish I cou
      • They usually just slap in a filter and call it a day. My neighbor climbed the pole and swapped filters on them and had basic cable for ages. The hardware here is probably so antiquated they can't reliably find out who's "stealing" cable based on the attenuation.
  • What will they think of next? The internet on TV??

  • Watch more TV with ATI (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:27AM (#10276272)

    Slashdot : Commercials for nerds, it's money that matters.

  • I'll pass (Score:4, Funny)

    by shane2uunet ( 705294 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:28AM (#10276288) Homepage
    I'm waiting for TV via Wifi. Oh wait, I guess TV already is wireless.
    • I'm waiting for TV via Wifi. Oh wait, I guess TV already is wireless.

      I know this was intended to be a joke, but the advantage to using a digital streaming protocol for video over wireless is that you can at least in principle handle signal degradation and dropouts a lot better than you can with plain old analog TV. I know _I_ got tired of doing the "wave the rabbit ears around until it looks almost-decent" thing.
      • On the other hand analog signals degrade gracefully. Even when you can only see 10% of the total image, you're looking at 10% of the whole thing, not 1/10 the frames or 1/10 of the picture. A little interference in a digital video stream makes the picture "jump" and may cause bizarre audio artifacting as well. A little interference in an analog video stream shows up as static, color that's "off", et cetera. Admittedly your quality is much higher in the worst working case with digital, but the quality of the

  • VGA in via USB (Score:2, Interesting)

    by automatix ( 664568 )
    One gadget I've been looking out for is a portable VGA-capture USB adaptor, or a KVM usb adaptor.

    When you're playing around with headless servers it would be really handy just to have the actual screen available. Once the machine is booted, there is always SSH but sometimes it doesn't get that far.

    A nice little window on the desktop containing the USB-connected machine, ala VMWare/VNC.

    • These things already exist, but they plug into Ethernet, not USB. For example, our servers at work have some built-in hardware which allows us to access the console even during POST via TCP/IP. Many dedicated server providers will provide what amounts to a KVM switch that can be accessed over the Internet so you can fix your borked server.
      • Our nicer Dell servers have this feature. I, however, would like to find an external box that does this- I.e., a little beige box with VGA, and a pair of PS/2 ports on one side and an ethernet jack on the other side. Now, I know they make KVMs that use ethernet lines as the transmission medium, but this isn't the same (especially since we don't run our own network, and there's no way to make sure that this raw signal will be able to go through the various switches and such that may or may not be in the way.

  • Not Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jozer99 ( 693146 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:32AM (#10276308)
    You know, using uncompressed video over USB just uses lots of bandwidth and processor power, both to encode the signal in software for PVR, and to control the USB bus. Sometimes a good MPEG2 codec can look great AND be used for PVR purposes without sending your P4 or Athalon XP to 100% usage and filling up your RAM and diskspace with gigantic uncompressed video. I had a card that used uncompressed video, and one with hardware compression, trust me, there is no compairison in terms of performace. My dream would be a USB tuner with a decent and flexable encoder chip, so that I could stream video as MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX or XviD.

    • some people... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ashpool7 ( 18172 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @11:06AM (#10276605) Homepage Journal
      ... want uncompressed signal so they can do more than dumb stuff like record TV and play it back.

      Some people, like myself, want uncompressed video so we can load it into a editor, chop out all the commercials, and encode it with DivX or Ogg Theora or something else. Or write it out to a DVD. Now they don't have to Fast Forward through the commercials.

      Here's another thing some people like to do. Hook up their VCR to the capture card, put in some old VHS tapes, and start recording. Then they can edit it, arrange the clips, and write it back to a DVD so it doesn't get degraded. The Macintosh is amazingly good at this sort of thing, particularly with DV cameras (if you don't have one, use a Formac Studio TVR).

      Anyway, you can't do any of these things with MPEG, because most editors don't do MPEG editing. Final Cut Pro and Premiere don't even do it (I've tried with v3 and v6 respectively). Why? Because it's lossy!

      Uncompressed, non-lossy video is good, particularly in open formats. Just because it doesn't suit your application doesn't make it any less cool.

      • Re:some people... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
        Unless you are doing professional video editing, and possibly not even then, you don't need uncompressed video. What you do need is video compressed without interframe compression, using a codec such as MJPEG or Pixlet. Ideally, the codec you use should use the same per-frame compression technique that your final product will use (DCT if you are planning on producing MPEG1/2 content) so that your production encoder only needs to do the interframe encoding, and there is no transcoding loss on your key fram
      • most editors don't do MPEG editing. [...] Why? Because it's lossy!

        Actually, I think it's more likely that most video editors don't do MPEG editing because the MPEG data stream doesn't do non-linear access very well.
    • Uncompressed TV-quality video doesn't take that much bandwidth, by my calculations (assuming a resolution of 648 x 486, 32 bits per pixel, 30 frames per second), it would come in at about 302 Mbps, which USB 2.0 (or either FireWire for that matter) could handle without breaking a sweat.
      • 32bpp is probably a bit excessive... You certainly don't need an alpha channel, which means a reduction to 24bpp and I'd assume a 16bit color space would be absolutely sufficient for TV-quality, too. PAL comes at 25 fps, a further reduction. I'd assume using some fast lossless compression algorithm would yield more savings. Of course, I'm far from knowledgeable about this topic (only watch the news), just some thoughts. :)
    • "My dream would be a USB tuner with a decent and flexable encoder chip, so that I could stream video as MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX or XviD."

      Here you go: (link [plextor.com])

      The Plextor ConvertX PVR model PX-TV402U is the ultimate personal video recorder for the PC. The PX-TV402U allows you to connect to a satellite TV, cable TV or broadcast TV signal and record programs to your PC. You can then watch the video from the PC or burn it to DVD for playback on a DVD player. You can also connect a camcorder, VCR or DVD player to

  • Wake me up when it supports HDTV (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) * on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:32AM (#10276311)
    Actually, I did run across a HDTV USB2.0 tuner [usbhdtv.com] but I don't know much about it.

  • Use of words.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:32AM (#10276313) Journal
    The user "reckons"? That implies he's never seen the product.

    Minor nitpick.

    Anyways, how would this thing perform as an input source for a PVR?

    I'd ask about linux support too, but, ATi, USB 2.0.. That's two strikes already.

  • Netcat ATI USB video. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I watch tv on my laptop already using the wireless connection to my dekstop using it's PVR-250 mpeg2 card.

    ssh desktop nc -l -p 7000 /dev/video1 &
    nc desktop 7000 | mplayer -framedrop &
    ssh desktop ptune-ui.pl

    And whala! I watch TV on my laptop via 802.11g wireless card. (I use prism54 based cards.. very easy to setup on newer kernels)

    Of course you can use video lan server to do it if you want to get fancy, but I like netcat and to run the channel changing gui perl script thru X tunneling over ssh.

    B
    • Betcha you Windows guys didn't know I could build a video streamer using 2 lines in a Bash shell, did you? And people say Linux is sooo hard.

      Doctors go to school for 8 years to write 2 lines on a prescription . . .
    • And people say Linux is sooo hard.

      Well, it is for people who aren't versed in the magical incantations that allow one to stream video using a 3 line Bash script.

  • Why not firewire? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CrackedButter ( 646746 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:34AM (#10276326) Homepage Journal
    I would of thought it would be better performing since its throughput is higher and sustainable plus isn;t processor dependent, those exact things USB 2 hasn't got. If its price then surely there isn't that much difference and just plain wrong if there is a superior connectivity standard out there?
  • This sounds pretty cool, but you still need to be tethered to a video cable. What I'd like to do is receive the tv on my desktop and be able to broadcast it via wifi to my laptop. I've done it before using the nullsoft streaming server, but it's a bit clumsy as I can't change channels. Is anyone aware of such a solution that would allow you to watch tv via wifi and change channels?
  • I've been looking for the smallest box I can get away with for my Powerbook that can do one thing:

    Display the signal from a component or SVideo source on the screen.

    I don't need a tuner or anything else fancy. Firewire or USB is fine, whatever works on the Powerbook.
  • A cardbus tv tuner out there?

    I get tired of this "let's put everything on USB" crap that happens all too often...

  • Isn't it already obsolete? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:36AM (#10276342) Homepage
    The TV tuner in the TV Wonder USB 2.0 looks to be an NTSC style tuner, compatible with cable TV and some over-the-air signals ... but if we believe what the FCC tells us, NTSC will be completely phased out shortly for ATSC. And more and more cable companies are moving to a QAM-encoded MPEG stream too.

    So, doesn't that sort of severely limit the lifetime of this product?
    • I still have a TV with screw-downs for VHF and UHF antennas.

      Not being cable-ready didn't shorten it's lifetime.

      When we switch to ATSC, plug your tuner box into the TV Wonder.

      If that's a problem for you, buy ATi's HDTV Wonder.
      • Yessir, but if you went to the store today would you be able to buy a non-cable ready tv? There are plenty of folks that can get by on older tech, but it's another thing to start off behind the curve. But you're right - dude would be able to get by, as you have. But it would be nice to see something in a dual format. One tech for now, one tech for the future.

    • Re:Isn't it already obsolete? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anita Coney ( 648748 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:46AM (#10276440) Homepage
      Broadcasters are only obligated to switch to ATSC when 80% of the local population are actually able to obtain ATSC signals. That means, that 80% of the local population will actually need HDTV tuners and monitors in place.

      That is a LONG way off for most of the US.

      • The number I've read is 85%, and "able to obtain" or market penetration is subject to interpretation. Many people count existing cable and DBS subscribers as part of the ATSC group, leaving OTA NTSC viewers in a small minority in most areas. The FCC wants to get this show on the road, so don't bet on NTSC living forever.
        • You're possibly right about it being 85%. And you're also right about the quote "able to obtain." The thing to remember is that "able to obtain" does not mean a possiblity to obtain, but an actual ability to obtain. And that means 85% of homes must actually have HDTV recievers.

          I agree that NTSC will not live forever. But it is at least a decade away. Consdering that computers have a three year life, any TV card you buy now for your computer will get plenty of life out of it before we switch over to AT
          • The thing to remember is that "able to obtain" does not mean a possiblity to obtain, but an actual ability to obtain. And that means 85% of homes must actually have HDTV recievers.

            That's one interpretation, and it's wrong. See the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. The actual law can be read here [cornell.edu] (Title 47, Section 309, USC).

            Look for the section (towards the end of the page) titled "Auction of recaptured broadcast television spectrum".

            ...15 percent or more of the television households in such market - do

  • Firewire and DV anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ewanrg ( 446949 ) <ewan@grantham.gmail@com> on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:37AM (#10276356) Homepage
    Generally I have found the firewire entries for doing DV captures to a laptop or to avoid tying yourself down to a particular PC to be better than the USB or USB 2 entries. This tends to be better supported in terms of both the quality of the image, and the ability to edit the file afterwards. Not to mention that there is excellent support in Linux as well as Windows for this (Kino and Cinelerra).

    As far as devices, my personal preference is a Canopus ADVC-100 connected to the output from a VCR. YMMV of course.

    Obligatory Plug - Please check out my online novel [blogspot.com].

  • Tangentially related: I'd watch TV on my notebook if I didn't have to have the coax feeding into it. I have three cable conenctions in my house, none of which are in my computer room. One however happens to be near my server upstairs. Is there a way to get the signal from my server (running Mandrake) to my machines in my computer room via wireless access? I could theoretically put a tv card in the server and run a TV program (tvtime) on the server upstairs vi a remote X connection to view it, but how do I g

  • Uncompressed != always perfect. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:43AM (#10276407) Homepage Journal

    When you see hardware like this, you might think "heck, why do people pay in the thousands for video capture cards with effects that can be done with current processors?" the answers are:

    Remember the video IN of your graphics cards with "VIVO"? with some you can do uncompressed streams, but why does it look amazingly ugly sometimes? noisy etc..

    The main difference between let's say a consumer card like this ATI and high-end card not only lies in price and bundled software, but also by the selection of components and the electrical design of the signal sampling portion of the board. Some will have basic filtering and signal conditioning (what I suspect from ATI) and others will have higher quality components, more signal conditioning features, better bandcut filters to limit noise, etc..

    While this is a nice way to have good video quality for an inexpensive rate, I'd keep my miro DC30+ board rather than replacing it with that, given ATI's track record with hardware and drivers, I wouldn't count on that hardware to work well outside ATI's bundled software, which is probably *very* newbie.

    Nevertheless, the good thing is this will force better companies to make similar specs at the same price breakpoint, end users and midrange users are the winners.
  • they stop using the exact same TV tuner from Philips that everyone uses in their TV Tuners whether USB or firewire.

    The biggest leap forward will be when it's a simple USB dongle like this [walmart.com]

    This also make it truely useful laptops. Even something as big as a deck of cards is impractical with a laptop. I mean we're all already carrying our iPods.

  • It can't be uncompressed. There isn't enough bandwidth on even USB2 to fit a proper PAL or NTSC TV signal at full resolution, 24bit colour 24frames/sec. Perhaps it's compressed using a lossless compression system or motion JPEG.

    • Re:Bandwidth (Score:3, Informative)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 )
      Maybe it's not 24-bit color.

      "Full resolution" is meaningless when you talk about an analog signal, too.

      ATi's TV Wonders in the past have considered 320x240 to be "full resolution", and anything higher was scaled up (video captures) or interpolated (still captures) from that.

      I don't know if it natively captures any higher now, but 320x240x16 at 24 fps isn't unreasonable.

      ATi used to really shine at all this cross-media stuff, nowadays they're teh suck. TV-Out quality on my 9800 is absolutely awful compar

    • Re:Bandwidth (Score:2, Informative)

      by Cowclops ( 630818 )
      A) NTSC is 29.97 FPS, PAL is 25. B) YUY2 video (essentially, full quality digital component video) is 16 bits per pixel. So take a 720x480 image 30 times per second at 16 bits per pixel and you get about 20 megabytes per second. USB2.0 supports up to 480mbits per second, or 60 megabytes. While it is more CPU dependent than firewire, it DOES have the bandwidth. I work for Avid, and our $25,000 Adrenaline box connects to the PC via firewire and is by no means limited by the fact that the firewire bus is only
      • Yeah I made a miscalculation.

        Mod my post down :)
      • You really need to consider 60 half-frames per seconds (PAL) instead of 30FPS for better picture quality. I suspect doing deinterlacing on the usb device and sensing full 60fps frames to host would eat too much bandwidth, but maybe not.
    • Uncompressed standard definition digital video (SMPTE 259M) is typically 270 Mbps. It isn't 24-bit color or 24 frames/sec, it's digital NTSC, PAL etc.

  • Nobody has said it yet, but this is HUGE. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cowclops ( 630818 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:58AM (#10276535)
    Everybody can debate whether they really want to watch TV on the computer or not. Everybody can debate whether usb 2 or firewire is better. But there are more important things that people are ignoring.

    I don't care about watching TV, but if this has support for capturing to any AVI format, it should be an amazing cheap video capture device. PCI cards based on the bt878 or phillips chips seem to be flaky at times, and when you use these, the audio and video aren't recorded on the same clock. You've got the video capture card and your sound card running basically completely independent of each other. With this, the signal will be digitized before your PC even sees it. It will eliminate a lot of screwiness as far as audio sync is concerned. This puts it well ahead of most (simpler consumer oriented) PCI based setups.

    As far as how it compares to products like the Canopus boxes that take an analog signal and convert it to a standard firewire DV signal, while these boxes offer pro quality analog to digital conversion, and no audio screwiness like the consumer PCI cards, they ONLY support DV. People, DV is not "full quality." 4:1:1 sampled video has VERY noticable artifacts because the color info is only recorded once for every four times the luminance is recorded. This makes scenes with highly saturated color and sharp lines have painful JAGGED (because its digital) edges to the color.

    On top of that, 3.4MB per second is just not enough for repeated processing without generational loss. The reason you can edit DV on the computer with no loss is because, in most video editing programs, you're only recompressing the effects, not the stretches of unmodified video. However, if you actually tried compressing a clip to DV a few times, you'll notice the mosquito noise gets noticably worse every time. An external capture device that supports uncompressed video allows you to bypass this completely by recording in formats such as a very lightly compressed mjpeg (I tend to go for about 3:1 compression. DV is 6:1) or better yet, when the quality really has to be perfect, Huffyuv which is lossless. In this way, I can avoid the 4:1:1 sampling artifacts for full color resolution, and no loss in video quality while i'm processing it for noise reduction and whatnot.

    Now, whether device actually does what I expect it to is a different story, but I for one will certainly buy one of these to try it out. After all, the worst that can happen is it doesn't support what i'd like it to and I can just return it/sell it on ebay.

  • All well & Good (Score:3, Interesting)

    by da_Den_man ( 466270 ) <dcruise@nosPam.hotcoffee.org> on Friday September 17, 2004 @10:58AM (#10276545) Homepage
    But I don't see a COAX OUT connector. Man, if I could get a system that has a COAX out (along with the other 2) then I could actually find it usable. No TV in the hotels I have stayed in (other than maybe the Hilton) have a monitor with anything BUT a COAX.
  • It also comes with ATI's suite of multimedia applications and utilities
    As an existing ATI user, I'd like to say... "Boy you had me interested there for a second". The ATI software is buggy and has some design problems (won't do PVR unless someone is logged in under Win2K, for example). The hardware still seems interesting, but they can keep the bundled software.
  • Will Firewire be commonly available in 5 years? If you were designing an industrial product which needed to be viable at least that long, and you need the elegance and peer-to-peer nature of Firewire, would it be a safe choice?
    • Yeah, I see Firewire being around in 5 years. Much faster than current designs.

      USB has no peer to peer capability, and I don't see Intel adding it anyitme soon (what, and lose the heavy CPU dependence?!) which secures it for one reason you've already mentioned.

      Of course, the better technology does have a habit of losing to the most heavily marketed tech (even if it's worse for many uses than the other) so who knows?
    • Yes it will be. All the camcorders I've come across that have digital connectors use Firewire for video in/out. Firewire cards for PCs are cheap. Many PCs and laptops have Firewire built in.
    • I believe Firewire was chosen as the dvd standard interconnect some 2 years ago. All the dvd manufacturers are busy meeting that standard. See the Audio Revolution article [audiorevolution.com].

  • Too bad it's ATI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LilMikey ( 615759 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @11:04AM (#10276596) Homepage
    First, Hauppage has a USB2 capture device out as well and judging from past experience that card will be much more stable, compatible, and reasonably priced.

    ATI's capture drivers and software are generally pretty crappy and, although they seem to use standard hardware, they jack it up enough to be slightly incompatible with generic drivers and software. Many programs had special hacks just for ATI cards and I imagine it'll be quite a while before this device integrates smoothly.

    On a seperate note, what the hell took so long. The USB capture cards have been crap since they came out. You'd figure they'd have USB2 capture devices ready as soon as USB2 started shipping.
  • I've been the (mostly) happy user of a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. It is an USB2 external tv tuner that supports mpeg compression in hardware at bitrates up to 15MB/s

    DVD's is about 6MB/s so i think that 15 should be enough for most ....

    The only problem with compression and decompression is the timelag when changin channels

  • Bah. Uncompressed = crap (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Andy Dodd ( 701 ) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Friday September 17, 2004 @12:35PM (#10277575) Homepage
    Uncompressed=bad in this case.

    Uncompressed video means you have to waste CPU time compressing the video if you want to record.

    The fact is, that OK video quality can be obtained by passing MPEG2 over a USB1.1 link. Just because your average USB1.1 TV tuner uses worse compression than MPEG2 doesn't mean that USB1.1 is bad for PVRs.

    Although USB2 makes for some nice additional headroom if you want to crank up the MPEG2 bitrate really high. But anything above 8 megabits/sec can't be archived to DVD without recompression anyway. (At least not if you want it to play on any DVD player.)

    55 pounds translates to at least 80-90 dollars US these days I believe, which is more than an Avermedia M179 goes for, which has built in MPEG2 compression, allowing you to record high-quality TV with minimal CPU usage. (When MythTV records from my Haup PVR-350 on my machine, there is zero noticeable CPU usage. I've stressed the hell out of my system by doing major recompiles during recordings and it didn't drop a single frame.)

  • How does ATI make it different (Score:3, Funny)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Friday September 17, 2004 @01:36PM (#10278250) Homepage
    >> it's not worth watching

    Well, guess what, even uncompressed TV is not really worth watching. Two hundred channels of complete bullshit.

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