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Electronics Repair (sci.electronics.repair) Discussion of repairing electronic equipment. Topics include requests for assistance, where to obtain servicing information and parts, techniques for diagnosis and repair, and annecdotes about success, failures and problems. |
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Digital bull****
Hi!
Which tuner card do recommend? I'm not sure I do, yet. http://greyghost.mooo.com/tv3way/ was my look at one tuner and some different software packages. *I would like to find one with onboard decoding, not dependent on the host CPU, that has well written drivers (directshow). For *analog* TV capture-to-video Hauppauge had a couple of different solutions. The WinTV HVR-1600 mentioned in the review linked to above has an onboard MPEG2 encoder as part of its Conexant chipset. But for digital/ATSC, the process is done entirely in software running on the host CPU. Software that, for no particularly good reason, could sap a Pentium 4 531 CPU in a Dell OptiPlex 210L PC. I think it's a question of efficiency somewhere--and I also think that one of the Digital TV converter box SoCs could be used on these cards to shuffle the burden away from the main system CPU. Just recently, I gave an ATI TV Wonder HD650 a spin, thinking that it might work better than the Hauppauge card. Getting it installed was an incredible job. Even the latest version of ATI Setup didn't work at all. It would constantly drop the machine into a Parity Error bluescreen! I'm not the only one who has seen this show up as per some searching that I did on the subject. You'd think anything serious enough to drop a working machine into a memory parity error (when the memory is definitely good and of the right spec) would be glaringly obvious to these people. I guess not. I finally did the setup myself, by using the Windows Device Manager to install the drivers. And with a little prodding, I got the ATI MultiMedia center installer to pop outside of the multi-installer set that ATI runs through as they set their software up. This worked around the parity error problems. The video quality isn't nearly as good as the Hauppauge card offered. It does seem like *maybe* it doesn't load the CPU as heavily. ATI uses their own TV Wonder IC on the TV Wonder HD650 board. It's not well documented like the Conexant part used by Hauppauge, so what all it has onboard is a mystery. However, the board very clearly sports a RAM chip, so I suspect that the ATI IC has some sort of integrated processor core and quite possibly an MPEG encoder of some sort. But where it works and when it is used is something I do not yet know. In the end, a Zenith DTT-901 converter box hooked up to my old ATI TV Wonder PCI board has worked the best of anything so far when it came to watching ATSC digital TV on a computer. William |
#2
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Digital bull****
On Jun 24, 1:47*pm, "William R. Walsh" wrote:
For *analog* TV capture-to-video Hauppauge had a couple of different solutions. The WinTV HVR-1600 mentioned in the review linked to above has an onboard MPEG2 encoder as part of its Conexant chipset. But for digital/ATSC, the process is done entirely in software running on the host CPU. Software that, for no particularly good reason, could sap a Pentium 4 531 CPU in a Dell OptiPlex 210L PC. I think it's a question of efficiency somewhere--and I also think that one of the Digital TV converter box SoCs could be used on these cards to shuffle the burden away from the main system CPU. Just recently, I gave an ATI TV Wonder HD650 a spin, thinking that it might work better than the Hauppauge card. Getting it installed was an incredible job. Even the latest version of ATI Setup didn't work at all. It would constantly drop the machine into a Parity Error bluescreen! I'm not the only one who has seen this show up as per some searching that I did on the subject. You'd think anything serious enough to drop a working machine into a memory parity error (when the memory is definitely good and of the right spec) would be glaringly obvious to these people. I guess not. I finally did the setup myself, by using the Windows Device Manager to install the drivers. And with a little prodding, I got the ATI MultiMedia center installer to pop outside of the multi-installer set that ATI runs through as they set their software up. This worked around the parity error problems. The video quality isn't nearly as good as the Hauppauge card offered. It does seem like *maybe* it doesn't load the CPU as heavily. ATI uses their own TV Wonder IC on the TV Wonder HD650 board. It's not well documented like the Conexant part used by Hauppauge, so what all it has onboard is a mystery. However, the board very clearly sports a RAM chip, so I suspect that the ATI IC has some sort of integrated processor core and quite possibly an MPEG encoder of some sort. But where it works and when it is used is something I do not yet know. In the end, a Zenith DTT-901 converter box hooked up to my old ATI TV Wonder PCI board has worked the best of anything so far when it came to watching ATSC digital TV on a computer. William Right now this computer, AMD Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz quad core) is recording QAM-256 HDTV with a Hauppauge 1250 card running WinTV V6. CPU activity is 12-15%. The other Phenom machine (8650 2.3 GHz tri- core) is recording ATSC HDTV with an ATI HDTV Wonder and MMC 9.14 software. CPU activity is 6-10%. The old Athlon XP 3200 with MMC9.14 and another HDTV Wonder runs 15-30% CPU time and while it's less tolerant of multi-tasking, it has only one purpose - to record HDTV - so it's no problem. I'm NOT a fan of ATI's software. I went through a LOT of 'upgrades' until they finally gave up and started over with the 650 family. Seems they still have issues. The 9.14 software has faults but once you figure out where the bodies are buried, it's pretty livable and most importanly, predictable / reliable. It's actually a rather rare event for the software to blow a recording. It's much more likely that I goofed something up like not turning on the machine. G² |
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