ATSC PCI cards
As of right now there are 11 confirmed working devices.
- The PCHDTV card
- The air2pc (1st gen)
- The air2pc (2nd gen)
- The air2pc hd5000 (3rd gen)
- The DViCO FusionHDTV 3 GOLD-Q
- The DViCO FusionHDTV 3 GOLD-T
- The DViCO FusionHDTV 5 GOLD
- The DViCO FusionHDTV 5 LITE
- The DViCO FusionHDTV 5 USB GOLD
- The ATi HDTV Wonder
- The AVerMedia AVerTVHD A180
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 (mplayer competes with recording) 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 on the HD-3000: 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 1st | Air2PC 2nd | Air2PC HD5000 3rd | Fusion HDTV3 Gold-Q | Fusion HDTV3 Gold-T | Fusion HDTV5 Lite | Fusion HDTV5 Gold | Fusion HDTV5 USB Gold | HDTV Wonder | AVerTV HD A180 | |
| Frontend | or51132 | bcm3510 | nxt2002 | lgdt3303 | lgdt3302 | lgdt3302 | lgdt3303 | lgdt3303 | lgdt3303 | nxt2004 | nxt2004 |
| Bridge Interface | cx23882 | flexcop | flexcop | flexcop | cx23882 | cx23882 | bt878 | cx23882 | Cypress FX2LP | cx23882 | saa7134 |
| VSB | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| QAM | yes | no | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| NTSC | yes | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | no[4] | yes | yes |
| Comp/S-video | ? | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes[1] | yes | no[4] | yes | yes |
| Analog CC | ? | no | no | no | no[2] | no[2] | yes | no[2] | ? | no[2] | ? |
| PID filtering[3] | ? | hw | hw | hw | sw | sw | sw | sw | sw | sw | sw |
- [1] Has 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.
- [4] Hardware should allow it, but the driver has no support yet.