ATSC PCI cards
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-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 | 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 | no[5] | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | ? |
| NTSC | yes | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | no[4] | yes | no | yes |
| Comp/S-video | yes | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes[1] | yes | no[4] | yes | yes | yes |
| Analog CC | no[2] | no | no | no | no[2] | no[2] | yes | no[2] | ? | no[2] | ? | ? |
| PID filtering[3] | sw | hw | hw | hw | sw | 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. 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.
- [4] Hardware should allow it, but the driver has no support yet.
- [5] The demodulator supports QAM-64/256, but the tuner can't handle cable frequencies.
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.
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.