Video-In

How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old card with this. I finally found an ATI one.

In article , Guest
says...
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old card with this. I finally found an ATI one.
My Asus 7800GT has it complete with a dongle that takes composite, RGB
and S-Video inputs.

--
Conor

As a Brit I'd like to thank the Americans for their help in the war
against terror because if they'd not funded the IRA for 30 years, we
wouldn't know how to deal with terrorists.

Guest wrote:
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old card
with this. I finally found an ATI one.

Use a discreet video capture card and you won't have to worry about it.
The same encoder chips are used for analog capture as the ones you'll
find on any GF7 with WDM capture (Philips SAA71xx, Conexant CX series,
etc). Plus with most current video capture devices (even USB2 versions)
you can get 2 tuners, an NTSC/PAL and ATSC/QAM/8VSB (or DVB).

"deimos" deimos@localhost wrote in message
...
Guest wrote:
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old card
with this. I finally found an ATI one.

Use a discreet video capture card and you won't have to worry about it.
The same encoder chips are used for analog capture as the ones you'll find
on any GF7 with WDM capture (Philips SAA71xx, Conexant CX series, etc).
Plus with most current video capture devices (even USB2 versions) you can
get 2 tuners, an NTSC/PAL and ATSC/QAM/8VSB (or DVB).


I tried, but none of those TV tuners seems to encode as well as the Nvidia
chips. Besides, why should I have to buy something else when it could be on
the video card? Hell. it's the good thing that there is another company out
there.

Ryan Hatfield wrote:
Guest wrote:
"deimos" deimos@localhost wrote in message
...
Guest wrote:
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old
card with this. I finally found an ATI one.

Use a discreet video capture card and you won't have to worry about
it. The same encoder chips are used for analog capture as the ones
you'll find on any GF7 with WDM capture (Philips SAA71xx, Conexant CX
series, etc). Plus with most current video capture devices (even USB2
versions) you can get 2 tuners, an NTSC/PAL and ATSC/QAM/8VSB (or DVB).


I tried, but none of those TV tuners seems to encode as well as the
Nvidia chips. Besides, why should I have to buy something else when
it could be on the video card? Hell. it's the good thing that there
is another company out there.

Yeah, I still don't understand why all those people spend so much money
buying a video card when they could just buy motherboard that does the
same thing.
Yes!
(what is the ironic smiley?)

The reason is probably quite rational. i.e. nVidia did market research and
concluded many people (I, for example) don't use video-in, so the company
left off this feature in the reference design, to avoid undue cost burden on
the board mfrs.

To give you an idea, back in the day, the 6800GT/Ultra GPU was a native AGP
part. The PCIe variants had an HSI bridge chip. As PCIe cards became
popular, some board mfrs were bitching about paying $5 extra for this bridge
chip, pressuring nVidia to spin separate GPU designs for the AGP and PCIe
cards.

The ATi cards have a separate Rage Theater chip on the board for video-in.
My X1900XT has such a chip. I disabled it in Device Manager (now it has a
big red "X"), to avoid the hassle of installing WDM drivers for it.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

"Guest" wrote in message
. ..
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old card
with this. I finally found an ATI one.

Gorby wrote:
Ryan Hatfield wrote:
Guest wrote:
"deimos" deimos@localhost wrote in message
...
Guest wrote:
How come this is not the standard? ****, it is hard finding an old
card with this. I finally found an ATI one.

Use a discreet video capture card and you won't have to worry about
it. The same encoder chips are used for analog capture as the ones
you'll find on any GF7 with WDM capture (Philips SAA71xx, Conexant
CX series, etc). Plus with most current video capture devices (even
USB2 versions) you can get 2 tuners, an NTSC/PAL and ATSC/QAM/8VSB
(or DVB).


I tried, but none of those TV tuners seems to encode as well as the
Nvidia chips. Besides, why should I have to buy something else when
it could be on the video card? Hell. it's the good thing that there
is another company out there.

Yeah, I still don't understand why all those people spend so much
money buying a video card when they could just buy motherboard that
does the same thing.
Yes!
(what is the ironic smiley?)

At least somebody gets it .

To the OP, the point is that you have combined two functions
unnecessarily into one device and if it fails or you have to upgrade,
you lose both. Plus when you consider that the encoding chips available
are precisely the same between both, there's no reason to have it one
the video card.

Sure it's nice, but for that extra cost to the OEM, they have to skimp
on other board component's quality to sell at the same margin, and it
becomes hard to replace your card (precisely what you're running into).

As for encoding quality, I can say that the SAA7135 chip in my KWorld
tuner is excellent beyond all doubt. It has temporal and chroma noise
filtering as well as motions filters, etc, all built in, which would
otherwise be done in software (it can even do deinterlacing).

Then take a look at the ATSC tuner built into the same card, it's the
NX2004, which is the same as featured in ATI's Theater 650 card (a tuner
lauded for it's excellent image quality).

So having a generic "NVIDIA Integrated Encoder" built into a mid-range
or budget graphics card is not as nice as having a good quality tuner
and your choice of high performance graphics card.

In article , "First of One" wrote:
The reason is probably quite rational. i.e. nVidia did market research and
concluded many people (I, for example) don't use video-in, so the company
left off this feature in the reference design, to avoid undue cost burden on
the board mfrs.

To give you an idea, back in the day, the 6800GT/Ultra GPU was a native AGP
part. The PCIe variants had an HSI bridge chip. As PCIe cards became
popular, some board mfrs were bitching about paying $5 extra for this bridge
chip, pressuring nVidia to spin separate GPU designs for the AGP and PCIe
cards.

The ATi cards have a separate Rage Theater chip on the board for video-in.
My X1900XT has such a chip. I disabled it in Device Manager (now it has a
big red "X"), to avoid the hassle of installing WDM drivers for it.

Um that Theatre chip also handles video transcoding, not just capture. You
might want to reenable it.

Transcoding, you mean like format conversion (e.g. MPEG2 to XviD)? Which
converter app actually uses the Theater 200 chip? ATi's own? Is it actually
any faster than CPU-based converters on modern dual-core systems?

The AVIVO converter is all CPU-based (albeit very efficient software), if
that's what you mean.

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."


"GMAN" wrote in message
...
The ATi cards have a separate Rage Theater chip on the board for video-in.
My X1900XT has such a chip. I disabled it in Device Manager (now it has a
big red "X"), to avoid the hassle of installing WDM drivers for it.

Um that Theatre chip also handles video transcoding, not just capture. You
might want to reenable it.

In article , "First of One" wrote:
Transcoding, you mean like format conversion (e.g. MPEG2 to XviD)? Which
converter app actually uses the Theater 200 chip? ATi's own? Is it actually
any faster than CPU-based converters on modern dual-core systems?

The AVIVO converter is all CPU-based (albeit very efficient software), if
that's what you mean.

The AVIVO software for the newest ATI cards does use some of the GPU for
speeding up transcoding tasks. Otherwise, if it was just cpu based only, it
would work with any computer and card , not just the X1000 or newer series
cards