Full-featured Card: Difference between revisions
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#REDIRECT [[Hardware or software decoder?]] |
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A '''Full-featured Card''' (short '''full-featured''' or sometimes '''premium''') is a term which originally described the early [[Siemens]], [[Hauppauge]] and [[TechnoTrend]] DVB-Cards with onboard [[AV711x]] chip used as [[MPEG2 Decoder]]. The [[DVB-S ff rev2.1|TechnoTrend Skystar 1.x / Hauppauge WinTV Nexus]] cards required that the host PC [[How to install DVB device drivers|download firmware]] to the card on startup. |
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Cards without a built-in MPEG decoder are called [[budget]] in this terminology. |
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Bear in mind that this naming can be deceptive; for modern systems with powerful CPUs a "full-featured" card may be simply a waste of money as a recent PC with more than ~500MHz should be able to decode MPEG2 streams in software without any extra cost. |
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For a long time the [[VDR]] Project unfortunately forced its users to install at least one of these expensive cards in their system. |
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No modern card design repeated this approach, Microsoft even denies to support this type of cards in their [[BDA]] Driver Architecture. |
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Today it is however highly recommended to install the [[VDR Software Decoder Plugin]] instead and let the "Full-featured Cards" die better sooner than later. You can spend your money a better way, invite your girlfriend for a ice-cream or drink some beer with your friends. |
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== Full-featured vs Budget? == |
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A full-featured card can do everything that the budget PCI card can do, but also provides hardware DSP and MPEG2 decoding (uncompressing the received video data). This typically comes at a 100% increase in cost, compared to cards which rely on these functions to be available in software. |
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The full-featured card may be a sensible option if: |
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* A slow host computer (or one running multiple tasks) is being used to view live TV. Even a 200MHz Pentium MMX can display a usable image from a full-featured card, despite being too slow to decode most MPEG video streams in real-time. |
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* An analogue output directly from the card to a sound system or composite monitor is desired. Once tuned to an unencrypted free-to-air signal, the premium card will output an analogue A/V signal with no further processor intervention. It will keep playing until reset, even if the host computer is unresponsive or crashed. |
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The full-featured card offers no real advantage under any of these conditions: |
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* The card is being used solely to record (not view) MPEG2 programming. Stored video, including DVD's, must retain a compressed format in order to be manageable in size. |
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* The card is being used solely to stream received MPEG2 to a remote network computer or to an MPEG-capable device (such as the [[MediaMVP]], which has its own MPEG hardware) |
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* The received video is being sent to a display adapter which already supports MPEG natively |
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* The original programme source is HDTV (for cards where the provided hardware decoder is SDTV-only) |
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* The transmitter is sending non-DVB or proprietary-format content, non-MPEG data (such as a satellite Internet downlink), or an incompatible video format. These include [[MPEG 4:2:2]] or [[MPEG4]]/[[DivX]] (if the card supports standard MPEG2 only). |
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* The card is used in a fast computer with adequate resources to decode MPEG in software. |
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The full-featured cards are PCI-only, as they rely on being able to transfer massive amounts of uncompressed video to a display card over the system bus. [[DVB via USB|USB DVB tuners]] will normally leave MPEG2 DVB data in its original MPEG-compressed form (easier to transfer) and are therefore not implemented as premium/full-featured cards. |
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[[Category:Development]] |
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Latest revision as of 05:41, 27 December 2016
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