Full-featured Card: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
m (fixed link) |
(set redirect, as all relevant info has either already been incorporated in the other article, or has been moved over and will be shortly) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
#REDIRECT[[Hardware or Software Decoder?]] |
|||
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 require that the host PC [[How to install DVB device drivers|upload firmware]] to the card on startup. |
|||
Cards without a built-in MPEG decoder are called [[budget]] in this terminology. |
|||
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. |
|||
For a long time the [[VDR]] Project unfortunately forced its users to install at least one of these expensive cards in their system. |
|||
No modern card design repeated this approach, Microsoft even denies to support this type of cards in their [[BDA]] Driver Architecture. |
|||
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. |
|||
== Full-featured vs Budget? == |
|||
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. |
|||
The full-featured card may be a sensible option if: |
|||
* 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. |
|||
* 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. |
|||
The full-featured card offers no real advantage under any of these conditions: |
|||
* 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. |
|||
* The card is being used solely to stream received MPEG2 to a remote network computer or to an MPEG-capable device (such as the [[Hauppauge MediaMVP]], which has its own MPEG hardware) |
|||
* The received video is being sent to a display adapter which already supports MPEG natively |
|||
* The original programme source is HDTV (for cards where the provided hardware decoder is SDTV-only) |
|||
* 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). |
|||
* The card is used in a fast computer with adequate resources to decode MPEG in software. |
|||
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. |
|||
[[Category:Development]] |
|||
Revision as of 14:35, 2 December 2007
Redirect to: