ATSC PCI cards

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Revision as of 19:38, 24 August 2006 by Jakep 82 (talk | contribs)
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As of right now there are 12 confirmed working devices.

  • The pcHDTV HD-3000 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 Kworld ATSC110

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

pcHDTV HD-30007 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 Kworld ATSC 110
Frontend or51132 bcm3510 nxt2002 lgdt3303 lgdt3302 lgdt3302 lgdt3303 lgdt3303 lgdt3303 nxt2004 nxt2004 nxt2004
Bridge Interface cx23882 flexcop flexcop flexcop cx23882 cx23882 bt878 cx23882 Cypress FX2LP cx23882 saa7135 saa7135
VSB yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
QAM yes no no5 yes yes yes yes yes yes no6 yes ?
NTSC yes no no no yes yes yes yes no4 yes no yes
Comp/S-video yes no no no yes yes yes1 yes no4 yes yes yes
Analog CC no2 no no no no2 no2 yes no2 ? no2 ? ?
PID filtering3 sw hw hw hw sw sw sw sw sw sw sw sw
List Price8 $1297 N/A $409 $119 N/A N/A $89 $149 $149 $119 $10910 ~$70

Note 1: Has a working comp/s-video port hidden behind the card-plate.
Note 2: Hardware should allow it, but the cx88 driver has no support yet.
Note 3: 'hw' = hardware, 'sw' = software. Hardware PID filtering allows the card to discard unwanted packets. This typically amounts to saving <10% of the bitrate of a 8-VSB or QAM-64 broadcast, and >55% of the bitrate of a QAM-256 broadcast.
Note 4: Hardware should allow it, but the driver has no support yet.
Note 5: The demodulator supports QAM-64/256, but the tuner can't handle cable frequencies.
Note 6: Some may have had sucess. Recent attempts using currently shipping boards have failed
Note 7: The current model (and the only available model from pcHDTV, as of 2006-07-17) is the HD5500. Price shown includes shipping.
Note 8: Prices shown in $US, rounded to the nearest $1, as found on the web on 2006-07-17. I didn't bother with the discontinued ones (shown "N/A"), as prices will vary on eBay.
Note 9: As of 2006-08-24, the product listed on the Broadband Technologies website. Price shown is their eBay price.
Note 10: Model shown on web site "MTVHDA180" is the "AVerMedia AVerTVHD™ MCE A180 (white box)"; Price includes typical shipping.

Air2PC

The Air2PC cards usually consume less PCI and memory bandwidth than the other cards because they have a hardware PID filter. The hardware only handles a few streams, which may be limiting if collecting EIT data. The PID filtering is most useful when recording one program in a QAM-256 stream, or when recording low resolution streams. It doesn't save much bandwidth when recording an HDTV stream encoded with 8-VSB, since that set of streams consumes most of the bandwidth anyway.

DViCO

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 for Gold, 2.6.15 and later for Lite.

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