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	saa7135
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.