Why invest in an HDTV tuner card?

[justinluck]

This is why





Here's the card:

[ImaNihilist]

seems more like a reason NOT to get one

[justinluck]

Yeah American Idol happened to be the only thing on when I was doing the screen caps! I swear!!! LOL



Here's a regular analog CableTV signal of the local news:


Here's the OTA HD signal:

[justinluck]

Leno...

[justinluck]

The compression artifacts you see are created by the jpeg format. They are not visible in the actual viewing.

[john99]

I was actually going to get that card, now looking at your HD caps I wouldn't bother.
The colour was very much screwed, & the interlace effect.

How was the recording? Especially capturing the raw transmission stream?

[irwincur]

Not all that impressive, looks very soft for HD.

The best way is to forgo all internal crap, and just get an HD box from your cable company. Get a $50 Component to VGA transcoder and you have true HDTV quality on any monitor - actually better than TV HDTV quality since there is not a single TV on the market that can actually match the real world resolution of a decent computer monitor.

The problem with these case, no cablecard slot will kill future use. Almost all digital broadcasts (except local networks) will eventually be encrypted, and the ony way to break that is eiter with a cable box, or a cablecard compatible system.

The colour was very much screwed, & the interlace effect.

If it has an ATSC tuner (which it does) odds are the color is not screwed, it is just correct - and you are not used to that. Wait until the first time you see a football goal post in HD, you will think that the color is really off. Then go check out a real goal post and you will realize that they are flourescent yellow and not a pale crap NTSC yellow.

As far as interlacing goes, set that thing to 720p. Monitors usually cannot do 1080i all that well. A PC monitor is a progressive scan native device, trust me 720p will look better, especially if it is a 720p native show.

[ewitte]

Originally posted by irwincur
Not all that impressive, looks very soft for HD.

The best way is to forgo all internal crap, and just get an HD box from your cable company. Get a $50 Component to VGA transcoder and you have true HDTV quality on any monitor - actually better than TV HDTV quality since there is not a single TV on the market that can actually match the real world resolution of a decent computer monitor.

I'd rather have the "internal crap." Its the only thing that will allow you to record to your PC or use on a HTPC. I wish there was some sort of card with just component input

Eric

[Kero-chan]

Originally posted by john99
I was actually going to get that card, now looking at your HD caps I wouldn't bother.
The colour was very much screwed, & the interlace effect.

How was the recording? Especially capturing the raw transmission stream?

i think the interlaced "effect" cant be helped. isnt hd cable and ota broadcast 1080interlaced?

[ksuohio]

Originally posted by Kero-chan
i think the interlaced "effect" cant be helped. isnt hd cable and ota broadcast 1080interlaced?

Depends on the netword. Fox broadcasts in 720p while CBS is 1080i. Soon we should have 1080p but not many tvs support that.

[ewitte]

Originally posted by ksuohio
Depends on the netword. Fox broadcasts in 720p while CBS is 1080i. Soon we should have 1080p but not many tvs support that.

I would think it would be a LONG time before 1080p is broadcast. But with a screen that supports it and good de-interlacing it should look pretty good.

Eric

[justinluck]

Yeah, I notice those interlacing lines in the screen caps too. But guess what? I cannot see them no matter how hard I try while I'm watching the actual video. I also notice that the jpegs are faded a little bit. I wasn't happy with the default brightness, sharpness, and contrast levels in the program, and changed them to look much better. But these changes are not reflected in the screen caps. I think when I take a screen cap using the program, it defaults the pic back to the original video settings.

I suggest going to http://www.dvico.com/hdtv/download.asp and download their demos files. They will give you a better representation of what the video looks like with this card.

[irwincur]

I'd rather have the "internal crap." Its the only thing that will allow you to record to your PC or use on a HTPC. I wish there was some sort of card with just component input

Most HD boxes have firewire support for recording, some also have USB2 support.






About interlacing.

A PC screen is a native progressive screen - set the damn thing to 720p. You would not believe the difference bewteen 720p and 1080i on my 19" monitor, like night and day. However, on the other hand, my TV excels at 1080i, because it was built to run an interlaced signal.

[irwincur]

Did you set it to 720p yet?

[PriMaTe]

very cool, how much is it