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Old 9th July 2008, 05:03 PM   #4 (permalink)
bigdonk
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Re: A few noob questions

Quote:
Originally Posted by Filby View Post
Im already going to apologise for the following newb questions, but Ive done some searching and haven't really come up with an answer.

1) Why would you need a analogue and digital receiver? With all channels now broadcast in digital surely you wouldn't want to use the analogue signal?

2) Are all digital tuner cards HD? It seems that some that are HD dont even advertise in their specs that they are!

3) What is the current 'flavour of the month' regarding tuner cards? The Hauppauge cards seems to be a good choice but which one?

4) Do most cards have hardware compression for when you capture the video or is the CPU doing this work?

5) (not tuner related) Do HDMI outputs on motherboards do video as well as audio?


Thanks!

Fil

Hi Fil,
No need to apologise, there all perfectly good valid questions IMHO..

1. Not all channels are yet broadcast in digital, eg here in Melbourne ch 31 is still analog. And from a tuner card manufactures point of view, does make a lot of sense to produce a hybrid card.

2. Most if not all cards on the market these days will do HD, certainly most of the ones discussed on this site will do SD and HD.

3. Yes the Hauppauge HVR-2200 seems quite popular at the moment.

4. digital tuner cards don't need hardware compression or decompression, the cards are simply a DVB-t FTA QAM simplex modem, to demodulate the signal and extract the TS stream. The mpeg decoding is actually handled by VMC and your video card, if it supports DXVA mpeg decoding.

5. is a real mixed bag, not many HDMI PC video cards correctly support audio, especially HD audio, such as Dolbly TrueHD and DTS-HD MA in bitstream mode. A proper fully compliant HDMI 1.3 video and audio card will be some time off.
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