ATSC Card Owners: Come here for Support (1 Viewer)

[wishywashy]

Thanks for the info guys

Paul S
Let me know how those Air2PC cards work out.

 

[Paul S]

Air2PC ATSC card

Commodore 64,

I have successfully added another ATSC capture card to the supported list.

I have a 2nd generation Air2PC-ATSC-PCI tuner card. It is a new but discontinued model, sold by the manufacturer on ebay for only $39.99. You have to ask for the "beta" BDA drivers, as they don't automatically give them to you. I believe the card has the bcm3510 chip in it. I'd have to remove it to check.

You have said in previous posts to tell you of new additions, and you will handle it from there. Please inform D_Man, thank you.

Here is a link to the manufacturers web site. there is a link to the ebay cards on the home page:

http://www.bbti.us/

I'll post thumbnail links of my graph.
And here's my CaptureCardDefinitions file entry:

<capturecard commercialname="TechniSat DVB-PC TV Star PCI (BDA)" capturename="TechniSat BDA Digital Capture" devid="ven_13d0&amp;dev_2103&amp;subsys_210313d0&amp;rev_02">
    <capabilities tv="true" radio="false" mpeg2="true" mce="true" sw="false" bda="true"/>
    <tv>
      <interface cat="capture" video="2" audio="3" mpeg2="1" sectionsandtables="5"/>
      <filters>
        <filter cat="networkprovider" name="Microsoft ATSC Network Provider"			checkdevice="false"/>
        <filter cat="tunerdevice"     name="TechniSat BDA Digital Tuner"		checkdevice="true"/>
        <filter cat="capture"         name="TechniSat BDA Digital Capture"		checkdevice="true"/>
      </filters>
      <connections>
		<connection sourcefilter="networkprovider" sourcepin="0" sinkfilter="tunerdevice"	sinkpin="0"/>
		<connection sourcefilter="tunerdevice"     sourcepin="0" sinkfilter="capture"		sinkpin="0"/>
      </connections>
    </tv>
  </capturecard>

I have one question. I also purchased a Vbox DTA-150 card (nice little card), because I wasn't sure if the Air2PC would work with MP. How to I switch or choose cards to watch live TV with. I can't be 100% sure that the Air2PC card is working, and I really don't want to have to remove and delete the Vbox card just to check the Air2PC card.

Paul

 

[Paul S]

Just to update my last post about the Air2PC card.

I located the section in the tuner setup where you can choose if the card is to be used for liveTV/recording. I unselected the Vbox from live TV. I (hopefully) was then using the Air2PC card to watch live TV.

The brief test that I gave it showed that it does in fact work. The video was a bit choppy and sometimes the audio was out of sync. The audio problem corrected itself if I stopped live TV and restarted it. The choppy video could be resolved by tweaking the deinterlace settings. I'll see what I can do.

Paul

 

[natrlhy]

The choppy video could be resolved by tweaking the deinterlace settings. I'll see what I can do.

Hi Paul S,

I have the Vbox DTA-150.

I have found that when I am recorind an analog TV channel and I try to watch an ATSC/HD channel it is very choppy and hardly watchable. This is also the case if I stop Timeshifting when watching the ATSC channels.
I have 1 Western Digital 500GB drive and at first I thought it was because there was too much head thrashing going on. I'm having a hard time believing this if I am not even time shifting with the ATSC channels I try to watch.

If I just watch an ATSC channel without recording a show from the analog card (NVIDIA DualTV) the playback is fine. Recording only 1 ATSC channel works fine, too.

Any other thoughts from people? I'll try playing around with the deinterlace settings as well.

 

[Paul S]

I have found that when I am recorind an analog TV channel and I try to watch an ATSC/HD channel it is very choppy and hardly watchable.

As I understand it, both of those processes are CPU intensive. When you record an analog stream, you are encoding it. When you watch an ATSC stream, you are decoding it.

Your video card should take some of the load for watching video. I'm not sure if there is a setting, but you want to do hardware decoding when watching HD video.

Take a look at the processor load when doing this, and see if this is the case. If it is maxed out at 100% this is your problem. You can check it with the task manager or some other monitoring utility.

Paul

P.S. The choppy video that I got was with the Air2PC card.

 

[natrlhy]

Take a look at the processor load when doing this, and see if this is the case. If it is maxed out at 100% this is your problem. You can check it with the task manager or some other monitoring utility.

Paul,

I ran a 15 minute test.

When watching an analog channel, the AMD 3800+ Dual Core CPU I have was running at about 5-10%. When recording the analog station, it did not change.

When watching an ATSC station with the Vbox 150, the dual core CPU was running around 30-40%. Recording the ATSC station did not increase the CPU load.

Another test I ran to see the CPU load was this:

Start recording an analog station. CPU at 5-10% still.
Start watching an ATSC station. CPU at 30-40%

While recording the analog station and trying to watch the ATSC station, the ATSC station is practically un-watchable due to choppiness and skipping.

Once I stop the recording of the analog station, I can watch the ATSC station just fine.

In a nutshell, I can only reliably watch an ATSC channel if I am NOT recording an analog channel at the same time. I can timeshift and playback the ATSC recording just fine if this is all that I am doing in My TV at the time.

P.S. I wasn't too clear in my first post, but the choppy video/playback was also from my ATSC card, NOT my analog card.

 

[Paul S]

I guess that it's safe to rule out CPU overload. Your system looks beefy enough to handle everything. The only thing I see is the power supply, 430W is ok but is it enough?

That being said, I have a 430W PSU in my main rig. It's running WMCE, and has P4 3.06 cpu, 2 300GB SATA drives and an ATI X850 XT Platinum 256 AGP. I had horribly jerky video on that rig, until I installed the ATI X850 and the SATA drives. I also replaced the original PSU that was 300W.
The picture on that is excellent now. (I'm using the ATI drivers.) I also don't try recording analog while watching digital. I don't even want to try, now.

I was just checking the CPU usage while watching TV with the Air2PC card. It ran around 80 - 90%.
That could be the cause of some of my trouble. My test rig has only a ATI 9600 Pro AGP 128MB. That may not be enough.

Just a thought. If you have seperate drives for recorded TV and for the live TV buffer, this could help. I think that is how I set up my main PVR rig.

Keep pluggin' away at it, you just may figure it out yet.

Paul

 

[natrlhy]

Thanks Paul,

I figured 430W was enough since the MSI 7600GT suggested 400W minimum.

I have been suspecting that a second hard drive MIGHT help but I don't want to throw more money at a problem that might not be solved with additional hardware.

I hope to figure this out soon. I gotta say it IS tempting to buy another drive. I really need to store my DVD collection somewhere

 

[Paul S]

What I ended up doing is trying ALL suggestions people threw my way. I was trying to get a good picture from BTV4, and asked for help on their forum.

Another thing that I just remembered, was to make the windows "swap" file static. In windows this is known as virtual memory or paging file system.

Right click on the "My Computer" icon on your desktop.
Select proporties --->
Advanced --->
Performance ---> Settings --->
Advanced --->
Virtual Memory --->

Change the initial size and the maximum size to the same size. This will make the virtual memory size static. Mine is set to 2000 MB.

Paul

 

[natrlhy]

I was just thinking of this! I figured since I have 1GB of DDR2 800 memory, I disabled the swap/paging file. I was going to try and configure Windows to use a swap/page file again and see what happens.

Thanks for reminding me of this as well. I'll post my results shortly...