Originally Posted by lord nicon21 i would't pay more than £20.00 for that :|
Well, consider this, I'm paying £120 for my new TV card sometime later. £20 would only get you a bog standard poor quality card, I've got a £25 and its not all that great!
There are a few niggles, as I mentioned, but I think they're software related rather than hardware. The ghosting only happens when you're in high-motion video with lots of moving around. It's not that bad, and the screen shots exaggerate it a little. Most TV cards suffer from the same thing anyway.
Good to see a company that has finally exploited the opportunity afforded by DVB - namely, to decode multiple channels from the same transport stream simultaneously. That seems to me like such an obvious (and, I would think, relatively simple) refinement that I'm surprised no-one has done it before. Unless I missed it. Which I probably did. So just ignore me - I'm not here.
Originally Posted by bigz you can link two cards together for dual tuner goodness in MCE, giving you a max of four broadcasts from two "providers" simultaneously.
If the product only has one tuner then to my knowledge MCE only records the channel not the transport stream, so you would only be able to record two shows at once (with two tuners) on mce not the 4 you mention.
Also the terminology of "Providers" is confusing surely you mean on the the mux.
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Originally Posted by MrWillyWonka Well, consider this, I'm paying £120 for my new TV card sometime later. £20 would only get you a bog standard poor quality card, I've got a £25 and its not all that great!
I hope you don't mean the nebula if so I wouldn't purchase one quiet yet until the 3.5 version of the software is out of Beta stage, at its current beta stage it's a pile of steaming sh*t. Although it will record more than one channel as long as it's on the same mux with one tuner, which i think was being explained in the review of the Winfast.
What alot of people seem to forget that this product has BDA driver which means 3rd party applications will be able to support fairly easy unlike the cheap dvb-t cards I see people buying lately such as the freecom usb dvb-t product and a few others.
Originally Posted by herbs If the product only has one tuner then to my knowledge MCE only records the channel not the transport stream, so you would only be able to record two shows at once (with two tuners) on mce not the 4 you mention.
I didn't state that you could record 4 different channels, you can watch up to four broadcasts at the same time with dual tuners, as you've got dual picture in/over picture modes, meaning that you can simultaneously view four channels from two different transport streams. You can only record from one channel per card.
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Also the terminology of "Providers" is confusing surely you mean on the the mux.
This particular tuner splits down channel selections into providers. Basically the software terms the channels that share the same base frequency as one group of channels from a provider. I believe transport stream is the correct terminology.
Originally Posted by bigz I didn't state that you could record 4 different channels, you can watch up to four broadcasts at the same time with dual tuners, as you've got dual picture in/over picture modes, meaning that you can simultaneously view four channels from two different transport streams. You can only record from one channel per card.
This particular tuner splits down channel selections into providers. Basically the software terms the channels that share the same base frequency as one group of channels from a provider. I believe transport stream is the correct terminology.
Sorry I misread but to my knowledge still out of the box you will still only can watch one channel at the time in MCE, as afaik MCE doesn't provide the PiP or other picture/picture features (click here). Also do you know that the drivers can support two instances of the same card as your example of watching 4 channels? as some tv cards cannot.
Transport stream is the whole mux.
Originally Posted by glaeken How does the image quality compare to the ati theater 550 pro?
The ati 550 is an analogue card where the winfast DTV1000 is a digital card, so depending on your country and location it can effect the quality. The winfast DTV1000 card (actually any dvb-t card) depends on the codec used for display , and digital streams mostly broadcast in mpeg2 format already and the recording is straight to hard drive without any conversion. So depending on the broadcast bit rate and compression ratio used by the channel your display/recording the quality can be poor or good, but with digital you do not get the issues associated with analogue signals check out https://www.aca.gov.au/radcomm/publications/better_tv_radio/tv_index.html . With digital there are different issues.
But to answer question generally you should get a better picture, and to be truthful alot of countries are fazing out analogue broadcasts on tv.
How do muxes/service providers work here in the USA. I have Comcast Digital cable. Does this mean that i can view any two channels at once, or that i can only view ESPN and ESPN-2 at once?
On software encoder analogue cards Dscaler is a good product to try to overcome this issue. On dvb-t cards it's more likely the mpeg codec that is causing this problem, also whether you use vmr or overlay may increase the problem.
Yet another card/software package that can't read the proper EPG info. Why can a crappy £25 Set Top Box do this but a £50-£100 card can't? If the developers can't be bothered to make the product work with the full UK DVB-T spec then why bother to promote it as anything other than a basic reciever? Having the official up to date EPG data is a vital function if you're going to be scheduling recordings or using it as your primary TV viewing equipment.
Ok, i have read the whole article, the whole thread. But this DVB-T card is totally useless to most of the european countries. I agree that the dual digital tuner in one device and supported in MCE is a thing that i accept with open arms. I also accept the much better quality then the analoge tuners.
The biggest problem with all of the DVB (S, C, T) cards is lack of Encoding decoded channels. In my country i have only 1! FTA channel. And i would have to have a very big DVB-T antenna to get a few FTA's from other countries. All our TV channels ar CONAX encoded channels.
Problem two: MS does not support encoding with MCE and only FTA channels. They do not want to burn their vingers on that. Yes there are a few DVB-T cards with CAM/ci module. Although very expensive and hard to find a "real" working one.
It is just to soon for a TV market in stress about rights and not having a openmind about what the consumer really wants...
Originally Posted by herbs But to answer question generally you should get a better picture, and to be truthful alot of countries are fazing out analogue broadcasts on tv.
You reckon? With a decent analogue signal you get a nice smooth picture with good dynamic range.
A decent digital signal looks great, with nice sharp lines and well defined colours. This is the case with DVD, but even DVD with its relatively high bitrate (compared against typical DVB broadcasts) starts to struggle with high detail high motion scenes - take a look at the amount of artefacting in the scene on the Matrix DVD where Neo gets "guns. lots of guns." as an example of this.
Now, because Joe Public likes to have 78 million channels dedicated to selling broom handles / playing re-runs of Friends / gangsta rap, the broadcasters, rather than broadcast say 10 channels of high quality, high bitrate television, they compress the sh*t out of everything so they can provide us with the wonders of yet another channel dedicated to auctioning off discount ironing board covers.
This annoys me incessantly. In the UK, the DVB broadcasts of the main channels (BBC1&2, ITV1, C4 and Five) plus a few select others (BBC3&4, ITV2, E4) get a tolerable amount of bandwidth, so they are watchable, but I'd still prefer a good solid analogue signal to the blockiness that can spoil DVB. Watch for the next time your programme fades to black, which is seemingly one of the hardest things to encode properly. Or, even worse, try watching a football match on a big TV on say ITV - the artefacting during the big pans down the length of the pitch is appalling.
What worries me is the same is going to happen with high-def - unless the broadcasters are forced to maintain a minimum average bitrate for each channel, they will start out broadcasting a handful of beautiful, rich, detailed, clean channels in high-def, then once they have got the early adopters hooked on the quality, they'll start degrading the quality by cramming in a host of 'value-add' channels to attract the mass market.
In short, I would say that in most circumstances, a well encoded, high bit-rate digital broadcast will outperform a decent analogue broadcast, but unfortunately decent digital broadcasts are in very short supply.
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Well, consider this, I'm paying £120 for my new TV card sometime later. £20 would only get you a bog standard poor quality card, I've got a £25 and its not all that great!
(did i miss that?)
EPGs are available in the UK.
yep, EPG works with my compro DVB-T200 too with the included software, and GB-PVR can find an EPG source too.
Also the terminology of "Providers" is confusing surely you mean on the the mux.
What alot of people seem to forget that this product has BDA driver which means 3rd party applications will be able to support fairly easy unlike the cheap dvb-t cards I see people buying lately such as the freecom usb dvb-t product and a few others.
Sorry I misread but to my knowledge still out of the box you will still only can watch one channel at the time in MCE, as afaik MCE doesn't provide the PiP or other picture/picture features (click here). Also do you know that the drivers can support two instances of the same card as your example of watching 4 channels? as some tv cards cannot.
Transport stream is the whole mux.
The ati 550 is an analogue card where the winfast DTV1000 is a digital card, so depending on your country and location it can effect the quality. The winfast DTV1000 card (actually any dvb-t card) depends on the codec used for display , and digital streams mostly broadcast in mpeg2 format already and the recording is straight to hard drive without any conversion. So depending on the broadcast bit rate and compression ratio used by the channel your display/recording the quality can be poor or good, but with digital you do not get the issues associated with analogue signals check out https://www.aca.gov.au/radcomm/publications/better_tv_radio/tv_index.html . With digital there are different issues.
But to answer question generally you should get a better picture, and to be truthful alot of countries are fazing out analogue broadcasts on tv.
I wish they had (leadtek) actually do something about that, because then tv cards wouldnt seem 'second rate'....
The biggest problem with all of the DVB (S, C, T) cards is lack of Encoding decoded channels. In my country i have only 1! FTA channel. And i would have to have a very big DVB-T antenna to get a few FTA's from other countries. All our TV channels ar CONAX encoded channels.
Problem two: MS does not support encoding with MCE and only FTA channels. They do not want to burn their vingers on that. Yes there are a few DVB-T cards with CAM/ci module. Although very expensive and hard to find a "real" working one.
It is just to soon for a TV market in stress about rights and not having a openmind about what the consumer really wants...
A decent digital signal looks great, with nice sharp lines and well defined colours. This is the case with DVD, but even DVD with its relatively high bitrate (compared against typical DVB broadcasts) starts to struggle with high detail high motion scenes - take a look at the amount of artefacting in the scene on the Matrix DVD where Neo gets "guns. lots of guns." as an example of this.
Now, because Joe Public likes to have 78 million channels dedicated to selling broom handles / playing re-runs of Friends / gangsta rap, the broadcasters, rather than broadcast say 10 channels of high quality, high bitrate television, they compress the sh*t out of everything so they can provide us with the wonders of yet another channel dedicated to auctioning off discount ironing board covers.
This annoys me incessantly. In the UK, the DVB broadcasts of the main channels (BBC1&2, ITV1, C4 and Five) plus a few select others (BBC3&4, ITV2, E4) get a tolerable amount of bandwidth, so they are watchable, but I'd still prefer a good solid analogue signal to the blockiness that can spoil DVB. Watch for the next time your programme fades to black, which is seemingly one of the hardest things to encode properly. Or, even worse, try watching a football match on a big TV on say ITV - the artefacting during the big pans down the length of the pitch is appalling.
What worries me is the same is going to happen with high-def - unless the broadcasters are forced to maintain a minimum average bitrate for each channel, they will start out broadcasting a handful of beautiful, rich, detailed, clean channels in high-def, then once they have got the early adopters hooked on the quality, they'll start degrading the quality by cramming in a host of 'value-add' channels to attract the mass market.
In short, I would say that in most circumstances, a well encoded, high bit-rate digital broadcast will outperform a decent analogue broadcast, but unfortunately decent digital broadcasts are in very short supply.