HDTV On Your PC - ATi's HDTV Wonder

Spinnerbait writes "ATi is getting their new High Def capable HDTV Wonder ready for release soon and there is a preview of the card over at HotHardware. It will be an add-in PCI card that will be bundled with their All In Wonder cards initially and eventually be sold as a stand alone product. High Def on a nice 23" Flat Panel... time to drool."

HOWTO?

[anish1411]

With all these stories about HDTV and big screens and wotnot, I felt inspired to hook up my TV to my computer. I have a 50-inch plasma tv, and surround sound with a hefty woofer, and - apart from the movie experience - how cool would UT2004 be on that!

Well anyway This site [ramelectronics.net] [ramelectronics.net] has some useful information about wot the holes at the back of ure TV do, and various other stuff.

Misconception?

[fnj]

It sounds like you likely have a misconception as to what 1080i is exactly.

1080i is 1920x1080, 30 frames/sec, 60 fields/sec interlaced.

Methinks this is still quite high for a PC monitor. Not to feel bad, though, because very few HDTVs can resolve every pixel of 1080i either.

720p (1280x720, 60 fps non-interlaced) is a better match for 95+% of PC monitors, and is still very pleasing.

Video Input and Output

[tronicum]

As long as there is not enough input (broadcasters) that provide HDTV stuff and suitable devices (HDTV TVs or video projectors) I would not invest a dime in HDTV.

As with DVD they will probably change the standard or remove and add some crappy copy protection. So if you buy stuff now you will regret within a short while...

How is this news?

[eggsome]

Both of my flatmates allready have HDTV cards for watching TV. One of them is even running it with Linux (Nebula Digi-TV).

Video on PC - Re:Component inputs?

[SendBot]

I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture.

With an inexpensive BT8xxx card and a decent linux box, you can use tvtime [sourceforge.net] to watch beautifully scaled and deinterlaced video in realtime. I use it with my gamecube and it's absolutely fantastic!

Re:Component inputs?

[Albanach]

You really don't want to try and run a PS2 or similar through a PC TV Card. There's a nasty lag in getting the signal processed and on to your computer screen. It doesn't matter if TV is running half a second behind the broadcast, but if you use your controller and you don't see your character move for half a second.

You need a monitor with a scart input or a games console with a monitor output. Don't try putting a PC in the middle.

ATi TV cards are soon to become useless

[Anonymous Coward]

The messages are pouring out of web forums, broadcasters have discovered the "copyright" tag they can send out with their programs when they're delivered... and ATi very happily kow-tows to the signal and says "sorry, this program is copyrighted and cannot be recorded" (witness last week's Enterprise).

Pretty soon all this hardware will be worthless, since nothing will be recordable except your home movies.

Re:Misconception?

[corebreech]

My monitor (a Sony 21" GDM-F520) can do 2048x1536 @ 85Hz, and has a .22mm aperture grill no less.

If anything, it's the graphics card that are holding things up. My GeForce 4 Ti4800SE can only do 2048x1536 @ 60Hz in 8-bit mode.

It can however handle 1920x1080 @ 85Hz in 32-bit mode, so for 1080i viewing I should be OK.

Re:What are the capabilities of the card?

[hazman]

Does it have an MPEG hardware decoder for HDTV, or is it only a tuner and demodulator?

It appears that this card is a ATSC tuner/demod (U.S. HDTV transmission standard). It likely passes the digital stream over the PCI bus to the video card (minimum 9600) for decoding and displaying.

Does it have TV out or can it only display on the monitor?

It likely does not have TV out of the card itself but you can probably use an ATI video card that has composite/svid out to display on a SDTV. The quality of the scaling is yet to be seen. Likewise, SDTV streams (tt has a standard NTSC tuner also) will likely be scaled to HDTV resolutions. Again, quality of the scaling is yet to be seen.

The real question is how good is the ATSC tuner/demod. This has been the biggest stumbling block to comprehensive and consistent reception. The digital cliff can be very steep.

Lag? What lag?

[ClassicG]

I've been hooking up my game consoles to my monitor through my PC for years, and I've NEVER seen any kind of lag like you're describing. I'm not using anything fancy either - just an old PCI WinTV card and xawtv and now the awesome tvtime [sourceforge.net].

Probably won't launch in the UK...

[Space cowboy]

There's little-to-no HDTV over here. The only place I've seen it in fact is in post-production studios, where they'll use it as a master-format.... Pity :-(

Simon

No support for cable htdv most likely.

[psoriac]

Notice that there is no slot for inserting a flash card; unless it supports an external flash drive connected to the PC via USB or similar (doubtful) this means you will not be able to watch the majority of cable hdtv channels, since they are usually scrambled and require a flash card with the decryption information in the cable box.

Re:HOWTO?

[Zakabog]

how cool would UT2004 be on that!

Speaking from experience, very cool.

Except for the fact that it's VERY hard to find a comfortable gaming position in this type of setup (unless you move your desk and stuff.) I had my PC hooked up to my 56" HDTV, and my Live drive's optical output hooked up to my surround sound system, it was very very sweet. The only issue I had was trying to sit on the couch and play. No place for a wrist rest, no place for my keyboard (except my lap) it became really annoying. I eventually used my coffee table as a desk and built a chair with seat cushions, it was decent but not as nice as a chair/desk setup. It would have been much nicer if I setup the TV for a good viewing position too, it's nice sitting in front of a 21" computer monitor cause you can see everything easily. But when you sit right in front of a 56" HDTV things become very hard to see. If you're too close a lot of stuff is out of sight since it's such a huge viewing area and if you're too far you can't see things like that sniper off in the distance.

Re:Component inputs?

[AIX-Hood]

This user is unfortunately thinking of using an mpeg-2 encoding board like a Hauppauge PVR-250 where there is indeed a lag. Boards like the ATI HDTV however just have direct analog and digital stream recording without any realtime encoding, so there's no lag here.

Re:What are the capabilities of the card?

[dirty]

The older AiW cards 8500 and up, have a very good deinterlacer and scaler built in to them already. The card will definately be able to scale to HDTV resolution, as any bt8x8 tv capture card can do that with any video card made in the last 10 years.

Just a guess, but this will look absolutely great, especially if you have a monitor which can display 1920x1080.

Re:What we really need

[AGTiny]

You already can... [pchdtv.com] it's called the Linux pcHDTV card. And no one will ever be able to make a card or other recording device with component inputs due to the copyright issues.

Re:What we really need

[dirty]

No they won't. No consumer pc on the market can handle recording an HDTV stream. Assuming a 4:2:2 image (12 bits per pixel) you're looking at almost 90MB/s of data. No hard drive can handle a datarate of anything near that. And the only hardware MPEG2 encoders that can handle HDTV are still way above what any consumer can afford. Honestly, I doubt you could even send that stream to your video card over the PCI bus. I think you'd either need the inputs to be right on the video card, or use a special, dedicated high bandwith bus from the capture card to your video card. And even then you would have no chance to process the signal at all, so all of your deinterlacing would have to be done on the video card.

I'm sure someday we'll be able to, but just look how long it took before we could digitally record SDTV. We need a lot more than a capture hard with HDTV capable component inputs.

Re:What we really need

[dirty]

Sorry about that 4:2:2 is 16 bits per pixel I believe, not 12, 4:2:0 (IIRC) is 12. So my earlier figure of just under 120MB/s would be right.

Re:Video Input and Output

[paxcirca]

In my area (Lawrence, KS), CBS, NBC, and PBS all broadcast (over-the-air) HDTV programming. PBS (and perhaps the others) have more than one HDTV channel running simultaneously - in other words, they can broadcast more than one program in HDTV at the same time. In addition, the HDTV tier of my cable provider offers HDTV flavours of ABC, CBS, Discovery, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. Also included are a generic HDTV programming channel and HDTV movie channel. At least in this huge metropolis of 90,000, the programming is here.

Re:Pixel for Pixel

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and no:

1920x1080 interlaced is what you get. But due to nature of the MPEG-2 encoding they probably use 4:2:2 which means only the luminance channel has full resolution.

ATIMMC is a buggy piece of crap

[sam_handelman]

I have one of ATI's older graphics cards (the first or second generation of their "All in Wonder" line) - but the latest version of their software.

And it is buggy, still. Their drivers are much better now, but in the begining they were dreadful.

I'm still quite pleased with my setup - in a one room apartment the TV/computer combination saves a lot of space, and I can surf the net during commercials. In spite of the problems, I recommend buying one to anyone who asks. However, every three days or so ATIMMC (the process that actually plays the TV) forces me to do a hard reset.

A lot of the problem is with win32, of course, which enters a non-responsive state when I try to kill the ATIMMC process (I don't do any actual work in a windows environment so my technical knowledge is somewhat limited - but if it walks like a kernel panic, and if it quacks like a kernel panic...). If I were still running win16 I would hardly notice something that took three whole days to crash my computer.

Also - the early versions of their product hardly ever worked in beige boxen. It was wildly incomptabible with a large spectrum of commodity hardware (I've been told their newer cards have this problem to a lesser extent.) I mention this because I went through a lot of grief over it - but now adays building your own machine isn't worth the $50 you save anyway.

So - while I'm really pleased with their product in spite of the flaws - I wouldn't recommend being a beta tester for the HDTV card, especially given the slow rollout of HDTV. Give ATI a year or two to iron out the flaws, and let HDTV acquire a little penetration, before bothering to buy. That's what I plan to do.

for a notebook..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.usbhdtv.com/ [usbhdtv.com] is a better choice.

Re:ATIMMC is a buggy piece of crap

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably have one of the first gen cards. I had one of these too. I also upgraded it to a "newer" one many years ago. I can assure you that they have improved. I have a tv-puter which simply acts as a TV/dvd player at the moment. It rarely crashes. It's pretty old too.

It doesn't like remote assitance (I was too lazy to use the keyboard) and a few other operations, but that's expected... :)

Re:What about Linux?

[hawkstone]

I have not tried it myself, but you should be able to use the pcHDTV card [pchdtv.com]. It's an HDTV card designed specifically for linux. It won't solve the cable-box problem, but it does support the OTA broadcasts.

It has been supported to some degree in MythTV since October (v0.12) [mythtv.org], and with continued updates since then (v0.13 [mythtv.org], v0.14 [mythtv.org]).

Re:What we really need

[LazyBoy]

There is a HD DirectTivo -- it works with an already-mpeg-compressed stream. There is a "standalone" HD Tivo that has been shown, but I don't think is planned for sale. It can handle OTA ATSC (also an already-mpeg-compressed stream).

There is no "standalone" HD Tivo with component inputs for the technical reasons described in the grandparent post.

Yes, OTA HDTV cards work under Myth. Again the key is working with the compressed data.

Re:What we really need

[JKR]

A studio quality uncompressed HDTV stream (at least as per BBC R&D Kingswood Warren 10 years ago) was about 1.2 Gbit/s (I believe that's 1250 line 50 Hz interlaced). We used to fit two of them into an STM-16 over fibre for the studio optical routing project I was fortunate enough to work on, back in 1993. MPEG-2 was still being worked on back then, but wouldn't have been used for studio quality signalling anyway.

So, probably more like 150 MB/s (less for the US / Japan since they use 1080 lines). Now, MPEG-2 might get you 10-fold compression or better, but that requires a hardware codec.

Jon.

Re:fraud

[Krojack]

Maybe I'm reading this wrong.. But the website says:

Complete Multifunction Tuning:

* HDTV WONDER will function as both a HDTV tuner and an analog tuner

Re:Flat Panel?

[Krojack]

I agree.. I think CRTs still have a much better picture. It seems that LCD's just don't have that small dot pitch yet like CRT's do.

Digital TV in Europe

[CMBologna]

What is the situation in Europe about digital TV transmission? I've heard in Italy there is a thing called 'digitale terrestre', is this card capable of receving such a signal?

Late To Market

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI is by no means the first to produce a card like this. There has been a PCI HDTV card on
the market for over a year, produced by DVICO. Unlike most cards on the market, that keep the
HDTV stream off the bus, and overlay the video directly onto the vga signal and you don't get to
capture it at all, This card dumps the raw mpeg2 out to you. It will tune over the air HDTV as well
as the HDTV you will get on cable.

The Fusion III just came out last week, I think. It has the hardware capabilities of tuning that holy
grail cable QAM 256, as well as over the air. And you get to play with the raw hdtv data,
and process it however.

www.dvico.com [dvico.com] - manufacturer
www.copperbox.com [copperbox.com] - retailer

Re:What we really need

[Chris Pimlott]

Erm, that's assuming no compression. HDTV is broadcast using MPEG-2 compression (specifically designed with broadcast media in mind), and the US ATSC standard specifies two data rates of 19.4 for broadcast and 38.8 for cable applications. The more often used broadcast rate is well within the capability of modern hard drives and the higher cable rate should be doable by high end drives as well.

Re:fraud

[-tji]

Not exactly...

In most areas, the digital TV stations are on the less used UHF band of the spectrum. UHF antennas are relatively small.

One of the most popular HDTV antennas is the tiny Silver Sensor [antiference.co.uk]. It's resold by Zenith and Terk at Sears, Best Buy, etc.

The last estimate I saw for HD availability was that around 95% of US citizens were able to receive HDTV. I receive no less than 20 digital tv broadcasts where I live. Even my parents, out in the middle of nowhere, receive 6 - including all the majors.

Re:Digital TV in Europe

[jjj]

In Europe, mostly the DVB-Standard is used to transmit digital TV.

DVB-S over Satellite,
DVB-C over Cable,
DVB-T for terrestrial reception.

All three variations of the DVB-Standard can also transmit High Definition video, e.g. there is an HD channel broadcasting via the Astra satellite system on 19.2East called Euro1080 http://www.euro1080.tv [euro1080.tv].

Some cable networks use proprietary encryption, but the basic transmission usually occurs via DVB in MPEG.

In Australia, HDTV is available over DVB-T terrestrially.

I don't know about the exact situation in Italy, but DVB-T has been rolled out extensively in the UK and I heard also in Scandinavia. Rollout has started in Germany with Berlin, some trials exist in Austria.

Regarding this card:
No, it will not be able to receive European digital broadcasts, as it uses the American ATSC Standard that uses other modulation, even though also MPEG2 is broadcast.

But there are DVB-T PCI cards available, they cost just a bit more than the cheap DVB-S cards (starting at EUR 60) - around EUR 90, but they also do not have a hardware MPEG decoder chip on board but offload that to the CPU or graphics card like the card mentioned here.

Digital-TV in Europe is mostly driven by the Pay-TV companies in each country with the UK and France having the most successful adoption rate - no wonder as old analog terrestrial TV offered only 4-5 channels of stuff people did not want to see (not implying that the now 500 channels piping out lots of crap are better qualitywise ;-)

Best regards
jjj

Re:Misconception?

[mmortal03]

Whether or not your monitor supports the resolution or not, this still does not mean that it can fully support 720p. It has to do with the length of the electron guns in your display. I cannot find the best source for this information anymore, but there used to be a page that explained the issue. Basically very few HDTV displays currently can display 720p correctly. 720p is MORE DIFFICULT to display fully than 1080i. This is the best I could do here:

"And if I can go completely geek on you for a second, there are very few HDTV's out there that can support 720p properly. Most HDTV sets have 7" electron guns, and they are too short to give a full 720p picture. So even if a TV says it supports 720p, if it only has 7" guns, you're missing some of the picture. Not a lot, but enough to shortchange you on what you're supposed to be getting. If you want a real 720p picture, make sure that your set has 9" guns. Most other sets will "downsample" a 720p picture into 1080i."

from http://www.planetgamecube.com/mailbag.cfm?action=p rofile&id=88

Re:Video Input and Output

[steve_bryan]

You are wrong in multiple dimensions. First there is a huge selection of HD content on the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and additional HD content on WBand UPN. Starting in the fall FOX will be upgrading from 480p widescreen to true HD. These HD programs are not available in every single market but they are no longer rare.

On the issue of copy protection the FCC has decreed support for the Broadcast Flag but no encryption of over the air (OTA) signals. Part of the directive demands backward compatibility. So although you may not have many or possibly any computer HD receivers, any that you already own should continue to work. Putting off the purchase will force you to the used market (eBay).

Re:Misconception?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 7" vs. 9" refers to the diagonal measure of the CRTs used in projectors (rear or front), not to the "length of the electron guns".
Every CRT has a "sweet spot", where the size of the spot drawn by the beam is very close to the size of the desired pixels. At the sweet spot there are no gaps between pixels, nor do the pixels overlap.
For 7" CRTs the size of the sweet spot is large enough (compared to the overall size of the CRT) that when you try to display 1920 pixels across the screen they overlap, effectively reducing your resolution. Sync'ing to a signal is not the same thing as resolving all the detail! (I don't mean to imply that you said it did).
In general, Projectors that use 9" CRTs stand a better chance of resolving all 1920 individual pixels.
Terms like "downsampling" are better reserved for LCD/DLP/LCOS based projectors. These have a fixed number of pixels (often 1280 by 720), and so have to downsample a 1920 by 1080 signal to display it.
Finally, the biggest reason that 720p CRT-based TVs are usually more expensive is that the horizontal scan rate has to be higher than for 1080i. Computer geeks aren't accustomed to paying more for fast scanning monitors any more, but 10 years ago fast monitors were significantly more expensive, and today fast scanning HDTVs cost more. Something to do with the power supplies and such costing more.

Re:What this card needs is a firewire port

[doormat]

You need 5C enabled firewire ports and software to capture transport streams... thats not included in your standard PCI firewire card.

Re:What we really need

[dirty]

The original post was talking about component input for HD signals from a cable box. Component HD is uncompressed analog. You'd need a chip to recompress it to do anything useful with it. You probably could display it, but your system would be useless for just about anything else.