Professional grade DVT-T digital TV tuner card?

[Gerry_uk]

Hi,

Is there such a thing?

In PCI or PCI-X so there's no A/D conversion? I want to be able to
record via PCI bus.

I'm looking for the kind of kit you'd find in a TV studio, with all
processing done on board.

 

[Paul]

Hi,

Is there such a thing?

In PCI or PCI-X so there's no A/D conversion? I want to be able to
record via PCI bus.

I'm looking for the kind of kit you'd find in a TV studio, with all
processing done on board.

What aspect of your current viewing experience, isn't adequate ?

At the TV station, they make an MPEG digital stream, and send it
via the transmitter as an RF signal. Once the stream is recovered
at the receiver, it is the same digital stream as was sent. As
long as all errors can be corrected at the receiver, you should
be seeing the content, as it was originally sent.

Digital to analog conversion would exist, if you had a tuner that
produced a composite or Svideo output signal. But if you record a
digital stream directly from the tuner, on your hard drive, that
should be the same exact stream as was sent by the OTA television
transitter. If you send the stream to your video card, and then
via DVI cable to your LCD monitor, that is digital all the way.

If you are looking for toys, try here:

http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/Products/DualDigital.aspx

For sale here for £114.95
(Fusion HDTV DVB-T Dual Freeview Digital 4 PCI TV Tuner)
http://www.theglowlounge.com/catalog/index.php/cPath/139

Paul

 

[Gerry_uk]

Thanks Paul,

What aspect of your current viewing experience, isn't adequate ?

It's hard to explain, but I'm not happy with my current "toy" TV card
which is "Compro Videomate". There's some kind of lag in the fast motion
action scenes, this did not occur on my old ATI analogue card and it
also does not occur if I connect my Sony external box via an S-Video
lead. It seems I can get a better recording with the external box, plus
the A/D overhead than I'm getting via the "pure" digital route. I also
don't know if these toy cards have on board DSP or if they try to use
the CPU? I'm also not happy with the software and drivers they give you,
strictly home user focus.

If you are looking for toys, try here:

http://www.fusionhdtv.co.kr/ENG/Products/DualDigital.aspx

For sale here for £114.95
(Fusion HDTV DVB-T Dual Freeview Digital 4 PCI TV Tuner)
http://www.theglowlounge.com/catalog/index.php/cPath/139

That's just it, they're toys! Actually there's a few on there I have not
seen before, so I'll read up on the specs.

 

[Paul]

Thanks Paul,


It's hard to explain, but I'm not happy with my current "toy" TV card
which is "Compro Videomate". There's some kind of lag in the fast motion
action scenes, this did not occur on my old ATI analogue card and it
also does not occur if I connect my Sony external box via an S-Video
lead. It seems I can get a better recording with the external box, plus
the A/D overhead than I'm getting via the "pure" digital route. I also
don't know if these toy cards have on board DSP or if they try to use
the CPU? I'm also not happy with the software and drivers they give you,
strictly home user focus.


That's just it, they're toys! Actually there's a few on there I have not
seen before, so I'll read up on the specs.

Lag, sounds like a lack of horsepower during decompression.
Maybe the Compro does that in software. Looking at the
Compro site, many of their products appear to just
pass the digital stream to the processor.

Try the following. Record a broadcast where you expect
a lot of action in the scenes. Don't enable any preview
function. Then, when you have a sample recording in place,
find an alternate playback software and CODEC, to convert
the recorded digital stream, into screen output. (If the
Compro software has a "DVD" option, for example, maybe you
can pass their "DVD" recording, to a better DVD player
software.) It could be that a different CODEC will do the
playback more efficiently. If the playback quality is better,
then you can blame the Compro software package.

You should expect real-time lag when software converts an
MPEG stream, into a bitmap output. But good software should
have some means of keeping synchronization between the audio
output and the video output. In the past, I have read about
playback tools, where lip sync is gradually lost the longer
the player runs. So there have been some dismal efforts at
player software in the past.

Does your processor meet the stated minimum hardware requirement
for the Compro product ?

Paul

 

[Gerry_uk]

Hi Paul,

It's not just with recording, I mean I'm not even happy with what I'm
seeing on the screen, just watching it. You get trails with fast action,
but when I connect the external DVB-T box and use S-Video and watch it
in the same window I don't see this problem. The direct PCI recording is
a joke, everything is out of synch, it takes too long to start and the
aspect ratio doesn't automatically adjust to the program material.

CPU utilization isn't high, but that doesn't always tell the whole story.

On my old rig I had an AGP 4x ATI AiW Radeon and it was fine; both with
built-in Analogue tuner and also with external DVB-T box via S-Video,
you could record using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 (DivX AVI) and the quality was high.

I only bought the Compro as a temp measure until I could get a real card
but now I can't find a real card.

My ASUS board is shown here:

<http://www.xp20.dircon.co.uk/hardware/>