HDTV capabilities

[Mark Lamutt]

I tried to get in on the beta test of the Fusion II card, but they didn't select me. Oh well...I also think that this might be the card to support first for HD applications. After reading everything about it, it sounds like it might be a better fit with Sage than the other HD cards out there currently. Of course, I'd love to have Sage support for my 2 hipix cards, but I'm definitely not holding my breath on that one.

[audio]

I'd like to vote for support of the DVICO Fusion cards as well. As I've ordered a Fusion HDTV I, I'd like to see SageTV support for all versions, not just starting with version II.

[Narflex]

I did send them an email about being in the beta test a little while back, but never heard anything from them.

Are there any HDTV cards where you can do recordings with GraphEdit?

[KenSpi]

Maybe a little late to jump in, but I'd like to see MyHD compatability. This is a current card, and distribution is local to So. Cal. (Digital Connection in H.B.) Development of the software continues, as is shown by recent beta releases.

P.S. I heard about your software on KROQ this morning.

[benjanet]

Hey, I just wanted to add my view here.

The Hardware decoder based HDTV cards are going to become a thing of the past soon. History tends to repeat itself.

At one point DVDs required hardware based decoders. We had a separate audio/video hookup on these little PCI cards. Soon enough, video cards could accelerate MP@ML decoding, and greatly improved the performance of a system watching DVDs.

Using a hardware based HDTV card, forces your computer to become a storage slave for your card, all its allowed to to is read and write transport streams. Remember the ancient 3DFX cards, and DVD cards, that used the VGA passthrough cable? Same principal, newer decoders.

Software based decoding, such as the DVICO card, is not really all software decoding. It relies heavly on the abilities of your video card. The CPU requirements almost double if you don't have a supported card.

With software decoding, and a good video card, you can have all your video output from your HTCP from one connection, weather its DVI, VGA, composite or S. Up until I found Sage Recorder, I was forced to use an AV selector swich just to watch different things on my HTPC.

Switch A, was the S output on my radeon card (and sound card output), which ran in "theater mode" for watching DVD, MPEG2, AVI, DIVX, anything that can use the overlay surface.

Switch B, was the S output (and its own audio) of my Hauppauge PVR350, which I used to watch, record, and timeshift TV. The hauppauge card can use the overlay surface and come out on the ATI card, but uses a very poor software only MPEG2 decoder (performs poorly on system).

And now there is even the sigma designs X card. Hardware based MPEG everything (but not MP@HL). Great, put those nice chips on a video card instead, where they are more usefull.

I feel that the DVICO card is the future of HD viewing, and I am going to buy a Fusion III the instant its avalible.

Sage should get together with Fusion, and make a great EPG/tuner app (make sure it can play DVDs and files easily too). Throw in DX9 overlay menus, and its finally the HTPC "killer app"

Ben

[Narflex]

I did send them an email asking to beta test, but they never responded. Maybe other people want to send requests to them for this to get them to listen....

[edmc]

Alas, DVICO may be like other Tuner Card makers, and think that they can provide the SageTV service themselves... :-( I hope not.

Incidently, I and many others over on AVS Forum also emailed to be on the Beta and received no response. I guess they only chose about 9 people and didn't bother to notify the others that were not selected. No matter, the board is now shipping from Cinefx and DigitalConnections (as of this week).

Unfortunately, I need to wait for the FusionHDTV III and it's QAM support - as well as Comcast to start broadcasting Local OTA stations on their cable in Pleasanton...

[edmc]

Although the postings are a bit ambiguous, I've finally discerned one glaring deficiency. The DVICO FusionHDTV apparently has NTSC (don't know about PAL) tuning as well. I don't know how the Video is encoded (looks like it uses a Bt878 to MPEG encode it I guess). But one limitation of these Bt8x8 chips has always been on the Audio side. Sure enough, there is apparently no Audio encoding on the card. See URL:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...32#post2042432

In short, the card requires a Line-In connection to your SoundCard. Kind of makes using multiple tuners or using this tuner and the Audio of the PC for different purposes. Kind of flys in the face of the nice separation model the Hauppauge 250/350 and ProVideo 250T/Pro tuner cards provide and Sage leverages so well.

I guess I'd just use the HD (i.e. Digital) tuning capabilities of this card and stick with my Hauppauge PVR 250 for SD (i.e. Analog) tuning...

I still vote for this card as it provides the (S/W + DxVA) playback capability distinct from Tuner Card H/W dependencies (unlike any of the other available cards discussed on AVS Forum).

Some encouraging news in that thread, however. It looks like other (all Korean) seem to be releasing similar products. Can't find the post which listed them, but it's somewhere in that flood of 400+ posts :-)

[metz123]

Throw in another request for MyHD card support.

[Mark Lamutt]

Do the MyHD, HiDTV or Fusion cards have a network interface or port available to link to? The Hipix does, and we're currently testing some interesting things with it and the Hipix.

We're looking for information similar to this blurb from the hipix documentation:

The HiPix application can now repond to network commands via
the included Hipix network client application and TCP/IP.

When the HiPix application is launched, it will open a TCP socket (port 9000)
and listen. When the HiPix application receives a connection request from the
client application, it will respond with a "Connected" message...

Thanks!

[edmc]

It has come to my attention that some folks using the FusionHDTV I/II have stated that although the Bt878 has the necessary A->D function for the Analog Tuner on the Card, that this function is not enabled by the S/W. Hence, those cards *DO* need the stupid loopback audio cable to record the Analog stations... [Edit: I suppose alternate S/W could be used to control the Analog Tuning function on the card(s) as it is just a stock Bt878...]

Which raises the question: If a Tuner Card actually has two tuners on it (as the FusionHDTV I/II and MyHD cards do), will SageTV be able to selectively disable one or the other? In my case, I am very happy with tuning analog via my 2 PVR-250s. I would only need HD (OTA and soon over-Cable!) tuned via the 8VSB/QAM64/256 tuner on these HD Tuner Cards...

[Narflex]

HiPix has a very high probability of being the card that we first support for HDTV. SageTV is already able to control the HiPix card for recording in the latest build (with some tweaking and custom proxy I wrote).

[gsr]

AccessDTV development will be starting again in the near future. A few of us have been in negotiations with AccessDTV in regards to the user community taking on development of the software, including the driver and the main application. We will be in a position to commence work on the project in the very near future.

If Frey Technologies is interested in supporting the AccessDTV card, please contact me regarding what you would need from our team and I'll see if we can work something out.

For those of you who are curious, changing the AccessDTV file naming scheme, allowing the user to specify how big file chunks should be, and allowing the "trick" play (skip foward and back, slider control, etc.) features for files that were not recorded with the AccessDTV card are high on our to do list. There are several posts over at AVS forum in regards to feature requests, etc. If anyone has suggestions, please go over to AVS and post them there or feel free to send me email or PM with your ideas.

I hope this is OK to post here - If anyone is interested in joining the development team, please contact me with your qualifications and what pieces you would be most interested in working on. We would be very interested in hearing from someone with driver experience (especially someone with experience with and access to the Compuware driver development tools).

[mkerdman]

accessDTV & SageTV/SageRecorder

I would like to join Geoff in inviting all present and prospective SageTV and Sage Recorder users with an interest in HDTV to take a look at the accessDTV Digital Media Receiver which sells for $249.95 complete with an excellent indoor Silver Sensor Antenna.

THE FOLLOWING IS FOR INFORMATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT INTENDED AS A COMMERICAL OFFER:

http://216.207.142.133/local/buyonline.htm

The accessDTV is the ONLY HTVD PVR card that can:

- Pause live HDTV

- Record a buffer of up to one hour that you can FF or RWD through and watch a program from the beginning while still recording/buffering the rest.

- and many many more "trick" features to come...


iTech, owners of the accessDTV product, have agreed to make ALL the underlying source code available to the new All-Volunteer OFFICIAL AUTHORIZED accessDTV Software Development Team to further develop its features to take greater advantage of the excellent hardware that exists of the card.

Geoff and I are forming the nucleolus of the All-Volunteer OFFICIAL AUTHORIZED accessDTV Software Development Team and would like to invite:

- anyone with technical code writing expertise and access to the requisite development tools to respond or PM either of us with your qualifications, interest and area of expertise in participating in the further development of the accessDTV software

- Frey Technologies to cooperate to bring together the best HDTV PVR hardware/software ("accessDTV") with the best EPG Programming and Guide Data ("SageTV & SageRecorder") to create the ultimate in HTPC HDTV Time Shifting and Recording available.

- all forum members and end users of both accessDTV and/or SageTV to express their support for developemnt of the SageTV service for the accessDTV Digital Media Reciver.

Please express your interest by posting here and feel free to PM me or Geoff Reynolds directly.

Murray Kerdman

[Mark Lamutt]

This should make Jeff happy!

[python]

Murray,
If accessDTV is able to get support for SageTV I will purchase an accessDTV card and SageTV software tommorow.

[mkerdman]

"python

Murray, If accessDTV is able to get support for SageTV I will purchase an accessDTV card and SageTV software tommorow. "

I hear you.

Let's see who else (at Frey Technologies) does.

Murray Kerdman

[lovingHDTV]

Any updates? There seemed to be some hope back in February.

Jeff, Mark anything you can add to update this thread?

thanks,

[mikesm]

I wouldn't invest a lot of time in supporting the hardware decoding HDTV boards like AccessDTV and others. Most future users of Sage TV's HDTV capability will be using the Fusion type architecture, esp given lack of QAM decoding support for these hardware based boards, and the increasing amount of cable systems offering HDTV on their plant.

Additionally, people who want HDTV functionality from Sage will be people that will use a hardware MPEG encoder like that found on the WinTV-PVR series, and that will be the primary way analog capture is supported even for folks with the HDTV cards, though at some point software encoding may be stable and powerful enough to do a great job, but we'll likely see different chipsets with better audio support by then.

So if Sage wants to invest some cycles on these old architecture HDTV cards, that's fine as long as it doesn't subtract from what will be the mainstream HDTV solution. I predict within 2 years most of the hardware based folks will have switched over due to QAM support anyway. Not a very good return on your software investment.

BTW, congrats to the Sage team for an excellent product.

Mike

[Eiffel]

Mike, I'm not quite sure I follow your argument...

QAM is not supported by any HDTV card at the moment... and the benefits of it are not clear (unless encrypted QAM is supported, which is very uncertain at the moment!). Dvico has stated that their future card will support QAM, but stayed clear of announcing a release date. The MyHD and AccessDTV hardware decoding cards are rumored to have the required hardware for QAM, although the corresponding drivers are not available... In short the QAM issue is not correlated with hardware or software decoding.

I am also not sure that people who want HDTV support are necessarily interested in analog capture either... On my system, I pretty much stopped watching analog channels a while ago, as digital OTA looks so much better. With this in mind, I will not invest in a NTSC hardware based capture card when I can get an HDTV card for about the same price (Fusion). Many people also have a Tivo which works quite well with analog video... but doesn't support HDTV yet...

Given the stress that HDTV puts on current computers, and the moderate price difference, It might be a good idea to support some hardware based cards too (this comment is coming from someone who owns 3 different cards... )

Finally, we should also keep in mind that the HD picture quality of the Fusion card is not quite to the level of the hardware based solution (try the standard 1080i patterns to see what I'm talking about )