ATSC PCI cards

As of right now there are 6 confirmed working cards.

• The PCHDTV card
• The air2pc card
• The DViCO FusionHDTV 3 GOLD-Q
• The DViCO FusionHDTV 3 GOLD-T
• The DViCO FusionHDTV 5 GOLD
• The DViCO FusionHDTV 5 LITE

The air2pc seems to take some work off the processor while I have read the PCHDTV uses 80-90% on an athalon64 3000.

My experience with capturing using the pcHDTV is that it uses 1.3% of CPU (azap + cat + cx88[0] dvb on an athlon64 3500). Actually watching live or captured streams does take a lot of CPU, though, especially without xvmc. --Mitch 21:50, 14 May 2005 (CEST)

Using a HD-3000 on an Athlon XP 1800+ and GeForce 6600GT: watching live 720p using mplayer -vo xvmc takes 45-60% cpu while 1080i causes frame drops and pretty much pegs the cpu at 100%. Capturing either takes very little CPU as posted by Mitch above.

Another data point: using 866MHz Pentium III with GeForce FX 5200, recorded 720p is smooth with mplayer -vo xvmc but pegs CPU. Live 720p is watchable if jerky with -hardframedrop. 1080i is another story; it takes 10 seconds to play 9 seconds' worth of video.

The ATSC frontend of the DViCO cards has been tested with 8-VSB (OTA) and QAM-256 (Cable) in the US. Source code is in video4linux + dvb-kernel CVS and kernel sources 2.6.13 and later.

Here is a feature matrix to help keep track of what card does what:

	pcHDTV HD-3000	Air2PC HD5000	HDTV3 Gold-Q	HDTV3 Gold-T	HDTV5 Lite	HDTV5 Gold
NTSC	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
Comp/S-video	?	no	?	yes	yes[1]	yes
Analog CC	?	no	?	?	yes	no[2]
PID filtering[3]	?	hw	sw	sw	sw	sw

• [1] Appears to have a working comp/s-video port hidden behind the card-plate.
• [2] Hardware should allow it, but the cx88 driver has no support yet.
• [3] 'hw' = hardware, 'sw' = software. Hardware PID filtering allows the card to discard unwanted packets, which typically amounts to half the 19.3 Mbps bitrate of an ATSC broadcast.