Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HTPC

Semi:

Really interesting thread. Would you explain to me why you need P4 2.8 for capture of 1080i? One thing to note that I think in Canada we don't have 1920 x 1080i HDTV. I might be wrong. And you are talking about capturing via firewire (like MiniDV on Camcorders) not capture through a capture card like AIW?. The highest capture I would need is for SDTV which is Rogers Digital. I forget what the resolution is for Satellite transmission. If I wanted DVD movies I grab ISOs on Newgroups or to my buddy that does that stuff 24/7 (You didnt hear me say that). I am new to PVR and have not touched into that technology since about 3 years ago when I was playing around with it (ASUS capture/AIW capture).

Currently for software today I use WinDVD.. it drives my DVD and CDs. Windows slideshow automatically load when I pop in a compact flash card. I'll look into that MCE when I get all my facts straight about that software.

Also with MPEG decoding on the card does that mean that the CPU is not as important. So in my case my C3 processor with a Sigma Design XCARD I can do the same job as a P4 with a AIW with software mpeg. And you know how good ATI is with building drivers and software. I don't know where they hire those programmers up at Thornhill, Ontario. But I'm led to believe they have come out of a programming course in George Brown College. <--thats not a good thing


Here is an interesting review. The Xcard supposedly outclasses most video cards out there for DVD playback.
http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/sigma_xcard/
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/products/story/0,24330,3351029,00.html
http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/xcard/
http://www.sigmadesigns.com/products/xcard.htm

chess;

Okey here are the pictures of the Booster. If I don't have this plugged in I get noise in the picture. With it turned on I get a nice picture. As good as cable can get. Unfortunately the camera shot of the TV did not do much justice. Theres one CNN take that turned out pretty good. But as you know using a camera to take TV pictures is not a good rendition of what it actually looks like. I actually reset all my settings of the Tv tuner to default to give you an idea of pictures right out of the box. You can adjust hue, color, brightness and contrast to better the picture.

http://www.spacelofts.com/Tv_tuner/

http://www.electrolinequip.com/en/products/drop_amplifiers/index.html

One thing to note is that the tuner has resolutions from 640x480 to 1024x768. You get the best picture matching your end projecting device. If is tuner is different than your imaging source then the picture would not be optimized for that source. Sunch as with this tuner it would look best with a 1024x768 projector. If you have a 1080i HDTV set then the signal coming in would only still be 1024x768 and then the set would probably rescale it as best as possible or not to its native 1920x1080 resolution.

I would only recommend this to projectors, plasmas, LCDs up to 1024.
I actually compared signals of the TV tuner with the Sony CPG400 vs a Viewsonic VX900 (which has only an optimal resolution at 1280x1024) The signal looked better on the Sony than on the Viewsonic LCD since the TV tuner had a max res of 1024x768.

The pictures are great Saturn.
Do you know where they sell those Electrolines? I would be interested in trying one.

Here is the distributors list. Send an email to find out where the closest retailers are to your place.
http://www.electrolinequip.com/en/contact_us/offices/rep_distr.html#canada

Hey Semi;

I was looking into getting a TV Tuner card/HD for the HTPC and looked into the Hauppauge WinTv-HD and just found really bad reviews on the thing. Have you looked into the Hauppauge product? Should I just go for the ATI product?

Thanks for any info
Saturn

Saturn,

If possible stay away from the WinTV line of tuners. Not very good quality, and even better - stay away from any kind of internal tuning solution as it picks up quite a bit of noise from the PCI bus and other components inside the machine (PSU etc).

However, if your looking at one of those cards for the bundled PVR solutions then you dont have much of a choice.

I went down virtually the same route as you. I picked up a VB50HRTV like you, and the deinterlacing was horrible not to mention the auto-brightness issue (not macrovision as it was doing it on a coax cable source as well). From there I tried virtually every capture card out there, from the WinTV's to Pinnacle's to a Zoltrix card modified by Ken Hotte (cleans up the picture quite a bit actually). I was never satisified with any of them. The ATI's worked, quality was eh, ok but I could not use Dscaler with them at the time (advanced software deinterlacing routines and misc noise filters).

Currently I have a Holo3DGraph (Immersive Inc.) input board (no tuner, input only) which has SDI, component, svideo, and composite inputs, AND does DCDi (Faroudja) deinterlacing. The quality of this board is amazing in terms of input boards for the PC, however it has a price to match and requires external tuning/sources (my case, satellite and dvd player for video sources as software dvd is horrible at video sources).

However, if your on a budget I recommend taking a look at the Xcapture board from Prolink, and or the newer Asus TV card as both are based on the newer Conexant chip CX23* which the H3D uses. Supposedly both are supported by the alpha version of DScaler as well, and some even say that some of the new deinterlacing routines rival that of DCDi, but I can not personally vouch for either of those cards or the new deinterlacing routines as the purpose of purchasing the H3D card was to put an end to all the upgrades and tweaking/frustration etc.

Side note on the H3D board, its a 480i input board only, 480p may be supported in the future, so even though it has component in you shouldnt get your hopes up on the idea of trying to pipe in a 1080i source and deinterlacing and scaling to 1080p or something (PCI bus cant handle it anyhow). But bringing in 480i with DCDi magic and say a Radeon to 720p looks beautiful (I dont like 1080i personally, and there are issues with the overlay and interlaced resolutions with the Catalyst drivers right now)

-pd

pdermody:

Thanks for the reply. I had to send my VB50HRTV for warrantee repairs. I think it dropped one to many times and something went wrong with the volume bar and/or sound circuitry. It was good that it did that now since the warrantee expires in 2 weeks.
I agree with you in that all the internal TV tuner cards have been a pain in the butt. I tried the ATI and there are issues with the software. I did pick up a MSI TV@nywhere with the new Conexant chip and it works pretty good. Color saturation and detail is definitely better than the VB50HRTV. The VB50HRTV picture was a little soft like the older ATI All in Wonder I have. But the nice feature is that it uses the same software that is for use on DVD playback on the HTPC. Same company that makes the WinDVD player Intervideo. And all for the cost of $100 CDN taxes in. All fit into the small package of my HTPC. It definitely was a pain to get it in that small case. It took a while.
Well the bad. The Remote still doesnt work. The person that sold me the item did mention it might not work. So I just have to come into the store and swap it till I find one working. Once I get the remote working I can use my learning remote from my Rotel and mimic all the commands so I again will use one remote. The TV software crashed once on XP today. Hopefully that was a one of thing. I'm not even going to try to do any PVR activities. I'm scared to even try it. Since all this is running on this HTPC it might be underpowered. VIA C3-933 cpu 512 DDR megs ram with a 20 gig notebook hard drive .. a slow 4200 rpm. There is a slight fuzz I guess coming from other components on the HTPC. But you will notice a nice picture with detail.
I might look into installing DScaler since it can be downloaded. But I am happy with the picture so far. So I might not even try tweaking and losing many hours which could be better used elsewhere.
ATI has alway have great hardware. I don't even know how they can employ or where they get those programmers at ATI here in Thornhill. I think they are hiring college graduates and pay them crappy money, promising crappy returns on stock options. There drivers and applications barely works. Your even better off using the drivers supplied drivers offered by the OS. At least those have gone through betas and updates.
I personally recommend any TV Tuner card using the Conexant chip. The video/audio decoder is excellent. To note it is a 10 bit video AD converter. The chip is a Silicon tuner & Conexant CX881 video/audio decoder.

Saturn,

Yeah I lost one VB50HRTV after a cable outage (took out whole neighborhood, and a few cable boxes, including my box). They seem to be kinda delicate as it did not affect another scaler I have. I forgot about the MSI card, that is another one that a lot of ppl are talking about as it has all the same chips as the others I mentioned. The only difference I have read in the cards are the various grounding paths on the board and how much noise they pick up.

As for the remote situation, take a look at Girder and Girder supported IR receivers/transmitters. I am currently using a USB-UIRT which as the name states a USB device, that is both a receiver and transmitter with a jack for external emitters (such as Xantech). It works great, Girder is *very* powerful, but has a learning curve. With this you could say use a universal remote or pronto if you have one to talk to the computer and control various aspects (especially with the pronto as the interface is as you design it)

If you are not going to bother with PVR activities I highly recommend taking a look at DScaler, specifically 4.1.5 and greater as it supports the newer conexant chips, its free all you have to lose is a little time. The various deinterlacing routines are pretty nice, specifically the Tomsmocomp series. When I was using it I was using greedy high motion which was pretty nice most of the time. That and the various sharpening and noise reduction filters are nice, and perhaps the second most important one after deinterlacing method is the Judder terminator which is a life saver if you dont have a device that can handle a refresh that is a multiple of the source framerate.

As for your recommendation on the newer CX chips, yeah that is the opinion of many right now, the Bt8x8 chips just couldnt make me happy (majority of previous generation cards are based on this chip). The H3D I use now has that chip as well as the Faroudja chip for deinterlacing.

If you are not familar with AVS forums, take a look. They have a whole section dedication to HTPC's. Traffic is quite high and lots of knowledge in there. That is where I first heard about Axiom speakers, in the Speakers forum.

-pd

Another thing to note on the MSI TV @nywhere. The stereo or SAP option does not seem to work. Mono can only be selected in cable mode.
As with the remote I just chucked it. I have a wireless keyboard and mouse. I just used my Rotel remote and used its self learning mode and copied all the keyboard keystrokes for each function. Now no more keyboard and mouse and just one Rotel learning remote. I will check out the forum in AVSFORUM. I've been there before but sometimes there is too much fuzz and stuff.

hey PD;

I went to the AVS Forum and I can't seem to find much newer information. Much of the info is based on hardware that is 2-4 months old. And you know with computers thats old. I noticed a lot of people using full blown systems with horsepower (needing lots of noisy fans or specialty heat sinks) and hardlyr saw anyone using the new stuff out right now. ie VIA C3 processor boards with built in 2D/3D video, hardware DVD compensation, SDIF for Dolby Digital EX processing, Firewire and USB 2.0, LAN, surround analog. Get a cordless mouse & keyboard and a programable remote and your all set. This setup is very quiet since big fans and big power supplies are not needed. All in a Mini-ITX format. And too boot it will cost you under $600 Canadian to build such a rig. If I was going to do PVR duties I would just get another PCI card that has hardware MPEG encoding. What gives with all those people spending in the upwards of $1000+ $1500+ on HTPC system. I don't know if I got this wrong but this small HTPC I built up can push excellent DVD at high resolutions and TV broadcasts equally as well. Hey Semi_on do you have any input in this since you yourself has been researching this stuff. I looked around and PVR activities are fine if you use a card that has onboard MPEG encoding and having a CPU faster than like a P3-600. Do I actually need horsepower for these activities?