HTPC - TV Tuner Reviews
by Jarred Walton on December 7, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
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DVICO Fusion5 Gold (cont'd)
The Fusion5 card can function in multiple ways, and how you plan to use the card will affect the configuration process. FusionHDTV supports standard analog TV reception, OTA DTV reception, and the ability to decode digital cable content (provided that it isn't encrypted). These last two features are also referred to as the ability to decode 64/256 bit QAM content (for digital cable) and 8VSB content (for OTA DTV).
When you first launch FusionHDTV, it will ask if you want to scan for channels. Say "no" and then specify the type of connection that you're using first: cable or antenna, and then select analog, digital or both for the channel type. At this point, you can click the "Start Scan" button and wait a few minutes. (It took about 4.5 minutes to scan through the digital channels and another 1.5 minutes for the analog channels.)
Most of the configuration options are pretty much self-explanatory. You can see several of the screens above. Timeshifting is grayed out on analog channels but is available for digital channels. Depending on which station you're currently tuned in to, you may or may not be able to check the timeshifting box.
The video options allow you to specify how the content should be shown. "Original Ratio" is our preferred choice, as any form of stretching tends to look bad. Some people don't like having black areas on widescreen displays, though, so the ability to switch to a stretch or zoom mode will keep them happy. The remote actually has a button that toggles between these three modes, which can come in handy.
Digital and analog recording have separate options, although the computer speed may play a role in what you select. You can capture digital streams as either the raw transport stream (with a .TP extension) or as a "Native MPEG" stream. "Native MPEG" mode converts the transport stream to a program stream (.MPEG extension), which usually has very little impact on performance or file size (and no impact on quality). However, it can save a lot of space if you're capturing an SDTV show where there are lots of extra bytes for other subchannels or null packets in the TS that are stripped from the PS. Given this information, Native MPEG seems to be the better choice, though in our sample videos (which were of HDTV), we chose to capture the raw TS.
Analog capture only allows MPEG2 encoding, but with several quality presets available. Choosing 640x480 and Highest Quality result in a data rate of 4000 Kbits/s and little to no loss in quality, so that's what we chose. That will use around 30 MB per minute of video - that's one-fourth to one-fifth the amount of disk space as a typical 720p/1080i HD transport stream, in case you were wondering. With hard drives costing around 40 cents per GB for the best deals, we recommend grabbing a 250GB drive (or several) and using higher quality capture options rather than worrying about disk space.
The Fusion5 card can function in multiple ways, and how you plan to use the card will affect the configuration process. FusionHDTV supports standard analog TV reception, OTA DTV reception, and the ability to decode digital cable content (provided that it isn't encrypted). These last two features are also referred to as the ability to decode 64/256 bit QAM content (for digital cable) and 8VSB content (for OTA DTV).
When you first launch FusionHDTV, it will ask if you want to scan for channels. Say "no" and then specify the type of connection that you're using first: cable or antenna, and then select analog, digital or both for the channel type. At this point, you can click the "Start Scan" button and wait a few minutes. (It took about 4.5 minutes to scan through the digital channels and another 1.5 minutes for the analog channels.)
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| Click to enlarge. | |
Most of the configuration options are pretty much self-explanatory. You can see several of the screens above. Timeshifting is grayed out on analog channels but is available for digital channels. Depending on which station you're currently tuned in to, you may or may not be able to check the timeshifting box.
The video options allow you to specify how the content should be shown. "Original Ratio" is our preferred choice, as any form of stretching tends to look bad. Some people don't like having black areas on widescreen displays, though, so the ability to switch to a stretch or zoom mode will keep them happy. The remote actually has a button that toggles between these three modes, which can come in handy.
 |
 |
| Click to enlarge. | |
Digital and analog recording have separate options, although the computer speed may play a role in what you select. You can capture digital streams as either the raw transport stream (with a .TP extension) or as a "Native MPEG" stream. "Native MPEG" mode converts the transport stream to a program stream (.MPEG extension), which usually has very little impact on performance or file size (and no impact on quality). However, it can save a lot of space if you're capturing an SDTV show where there are lots of extra bytes for other subchannels or null packets in the TS that are stripped from the PS. Given this information, Native MPEG seems to be the better choice, though in our sample videos (which were of HDTV), we chose to capture the raw TS.
Analog capture only allows MPEG2 encoding, but with several quality presets available. Choosing 640x480 and Highest Quality result in a data rate of 4000 Kbits/s and little to no loss in quality, so that's what we chose. That will use around 30 MB per minute of video - that's one-fourth to one-fifth the amount of disk space as a typical 720p/1080i HD transport stream, in case you were wondering. With hard drives costing around 40 cents per GB for the best deals, we recommend grabbing a 250GB drive (or several) and using higher quality capture options rather than worrying about disk space.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, December 8, 2005 - link
Just to clarify, I'm speaking of overlay mode in general. The MyHD card overlay mode is limited to 720 x 484 reason. It does hardware decoding, which means it's generating the uncompressed HDTV stream on the card. A 720P compressed signal is up to 15 Mb per second. That presents no problem for the PCI bus. Uncompressed 720P, on the other hand, requires more bandwidth than the PCI bus can handle.1280 x 720 = 921600 pixels per frame
4 bytes per pixel = 3686400 bytes per frame.
60 frames per second = 221184000 bytes per second.
The PCI bus is a 32-bit bus, running at 33 MHz, giving a maximum bandwidth of 133 MB per second. Uncompressed 720P would require about 211 MB per second. This is one of many reasons that the AGP slot was created. The CPU can render into an AGP cards memory at up to 2133 MB per second, at least in theory.
So there is a reason that the my HD card doesn't render the overlay mode in anything more than 720 x 480. That doesn't mean I have to like that limitation. :-)
Crucial - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
I don't understand what the point of this review was. Why would you test a hardware based analog card with 2 cards that have software based analog? The addition of the theatre 550 card was completely unecessary and frankly makes no sense at all.A more effective test would have put the 2 HD cards up against the ATI HDTV wonder and another seperate test putting the 550 against the Hauppage pvr150 and an Avermedia card.
The Boston Dangler - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
Good oneJarredWalton - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
The review was because I had the cards. We've had complaints about putting out single item reviews. We've already looked at the HDTV Wonder, and it doesn't work for me - no QAM support and I don't want to get an expensive OTA antenna for a rental home. The whole article is a "state of the TV Tuner market" as well as individual card reviews, or at least that's how I intended it. Besides, the Theater 550 PCIe is really just a PCIe version of the PCI card we've already looked at, which is good to know.Previous analog tuners have been reviewed, and the ATI HDTV Wonder has also been reviewed. If you can get good OTA DTV reception, you probably have no need for something like the Fusion5 or MyHD. For people like me, though, the choices boil down to forgetting about DTV, getting a DVR upgrade to my cable box, and/or getting one of those two cards.
After playing with all the cards, I would say your best bet for quality is to get two cards, one of analog and a second for DTV.
Ceramicsteve - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
Hey can you include a Mac based HDTV tuner in your round up? The only one I know of is EyETV from Elgato systems and it comes in a form of a breakout box.scott967 - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
I take it none of these tuners support HDCP on the digital out?scott s.
.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
That's correct, though I may have screwed up when I talked about my TV. I don't know if it has an HDMI or an HDCP port. I thought it was HDMI, but I could be mistaken.Olaf van der Spek - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
> Using the Sempron 64 running at 2.50 GHz was more than sufficient for everything but the MyHD analog recording.There are no Semprons that run at 2.5 ghz.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - link
I had it overclocked -- I was trying to see if I could get it to work OK for the MyHD card.Olaf van der Spek - Thursday, December 8, 2005 - link
It may be a good idea to mentioned you were overclocking.