Hi
I read that the signal from a DVD Player (Svideo) I guess is good for television but not good enough for these projectors.
Im trying to decide to go with something like the Viewsonic N6/N4 or build a dedicated machine (PC) for my projector. ????????
The advantages toward the PC are the ability to play games on the big screen or web surf etc. WHile the other route would be strictly movies....
Im thinking as I type .never a good idea )
I suppose I could run a video signal from a PC into the N6 to play games.

Any way I bumped up the resolution on my PC at my desktop machine and loaded a DVD.
It was way to slow on the highest settings because ????? My Video cards to slow ??
I cant remember what card I installed in this one.

What card would be best for a projector ??? Radeon 9600 ??

And how does TV tuner come into the picture ?
Is that a seperate card from the Video card ?

Im not concerned with the sound part, I Have an awesome system for that already.
At least I think its awesome. Thats a different forum though )

Im thinking of one of those micro PC's With Wireless keyboard/mouse, DVD Player
and an Nic card. Incorperated into the projector,Then call it could and run it.
It doesnt need to do a lot, just process signal. But what it does do it needs to do well.

Any Help would be appreciated.
Thanks Steve

I noticed lowly Wal-mart had Radeon All in Wonder 9100's for only $150, online should be even better. These cards have the tuner built in, and you get the TIVO function, etc etc. etc. Might even get a remote control.

I know the All in Wonder's have hardware decoding, or at least I think I know... Point is that if so, it would take the workload off the computer CPU.

The Nexus-s is very nice, you can tweak it to get dishnet and (BEV "expressvu"), and you get a remote. all though the price is a little steep and a pain to track one down, i think is well worth it.

oh and the requirements for it...


To use the WinTV-DVB-s card, you will need the following:
PC with Pentium Processor, (Pentium 266MHz or higher recommended)
Free bus-master PCI Socket
32 MB RAM minimum
PCI or AGP Graphic card, running at a minimum resolution of 800 x 600 Pixel, in either 'High Colour' (16 Bit) or 'True Colour' (24 or 32 Bit)
Active speaker or soundcard/speaker combination
CD-ROM Drive (only required for software installation)
Microsoft Windows 95 / 98 / 2000
DirectX 5 or higher
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher


nice eh

Those specs don't seem right.

There are a variety of cards on the market. Some have hardware decoding, some don't, some and direct X (dxva) capable, which uses the GPU for hardware decoding, via a software driver.

You really need to research the combinations and also have a good idea of what is is you're trying to achieve.

The two main TV tuner cards that people have used in the past are the hauppage (sp?) PVR-250 and PVR-350. They have hardware decoders and in-built hardware mpeg 2 encoders. They are for standard television though. With HD becoming more poular you're likely going to want a HD card. All the ones I've seen so far do not have hardware based decoders. I'd also check compatibility with Dscaler as Dscaler doesn't work with all tuner/capture cards and is renound as being the best de-interlace/inverse telecine software availabe.. and it's free.

I recently bought a Fusion DVB-T card, great pic, and had a dxva driver. My Nvideo Gforce 4mx is also dxva capable so I can watch HD on a P3 733. Without the dxva I'd need a P4 2.4 Ghz minimum.

The fusion card also has s-video and composite in so I can hook up the vcr and playstation 2 and use those on the projector, automagically scaled and deinterlaced. There is no need for an external DVD player, the PC will do a much better job anyway.
Unfortunately dvico are a new player in the Australian market and their software is lacking at present, but it'll get there.

So, all I can say is do the research and get what you need. The Radeon AIW cards are good if you only need standard definition TV but your probably better off spending less on 2 individual cards to keep your upgrade options open.

Also, there are different variants of these cards:

DVB-T (for terristrial, over the air broadcast HDTV).
DBV-S (for hookup to sattelite receivers).
etc etc...

Cheers,
Arkay.

what dosent seem to be right with those specs?
also about the quality of HD, by the time it gets to my screen or wall im sure yes it will look much nicer, but for me HD on my wall isnt that important, its still a projection.

Just that the CPU speeds etc seem a little on the low side for a DVB-s card. Not saying they're wrong. Just seem a little light on is all.

Cheers,
Arkay.

ya your right on that, they are kinda low, but i guess thats what makes that dvb borad attractive. i have seen it work on a p3, and use next to zero resources, the meter flickered back and forth from 0% to 3% every so often while processing, buffering, decrypting etc expressvu.

i believe those specs for the nexus are correct.If im not mistaken the nexus is a hardware based card wich does all the work for the pc, as apposed to software based cards wich rely heavily on your computers hardware.

The nexus gets away with it because it has hardware decoders and encoders, it takes a real strain of the processor. Arkay, I think you where getting your decoders and encoders mixed up. Decoding is when you wanna play a video file on your computer, encoding is when you want to record video to a file. The pvr's all have encoders on board (to take the strain off the CPU, because without it your capture resolution is rubbish and will drop frames left right and center if your processor isnt really powerfully). Only the pvr 350 has a hardware decoder so that it can play the video file back out to tv, the rest play the picture to the screen via software decoding because its basically a cheep and cheerfull way of doing it (media players been doing it for years!).

I've just read over this thread because it is of some interest to me. However, on reading the Nexus link there appears a comment:

Note: though DVB-s is the transmission specification for satellite pay-TV services in North America, such as Direct-TV, neither the WinTV-Nexus nor the WinTV-DVB cannot receive these broadcasts due to proprietary encryption schemes used.

Despite the grammatical error, ( should read: neither the WinTV-Nexus nor the WinTV-DVB <can> receive these broadcasts due to proprietary encryption schemes used.) it raises doubts whether this card can successfully be used with a BellExpressVu 6100 HDTV receiver.

Do you actually use this card and can you vouch for the incorrectness of the Nexus statement ?

Hey SuperBob do you know if the ATSC version of the wintv-hd has a hardware decoder? Can't seem to find it anywhere but the specs on it are low as well.

woha, slow down a little, remember i'm uk not us, tbh i know nothing about that card (we dont have them here) from the looks and sounds of the thing i'd say it doesnt although its confusing because i'm not sure how your digital tv actually works (DVB-t is basically an mpeg2 stream send over the air, which means you dont need an encoder, its allready preped and ready to go, you just stream it straight to the hard drive for cheep pvr goodness!), its odd that its a digital TV card and has an analogue tuner on board which also makes me doubt how US dig tv is done. Basically i dont know but i'll try and get some info for you guys.

Oh also as for specs you can often go a lot lower than what we say simply by having a clean build of windows (soooo many users with copies of xp that havent been formated since xp first came out and are soooo cloged up with the crap that your average user seems to install), basically we set them a lot higher than they need to be, but then thats true of about every hardware manufacturer. If you wanna know why, try giving support to a customer who's just baught a nova-t pci and wanders why it isnt working running on p3-450 with '98, a cmedia sound card and a 4meg S3 graphics card!!! HOURS OF PAIN!!

Sorry you just seemed to know quite a bit about the other hauppauge cards so I thought you might know. But just for reference sake it is impossible to broadcast over the air a digital signal. But for that matter you can't do it with phonelines either. You broadcast an analog signal that carries digital information. Satellites do the same thing microwave and all that. So even your Sat dish has an analog tuner in it. About the only way I know to "broadcast" a true digital signal is with fiber. I guess you could do it in short runs of coax copper but it would not be practical. Anyway the analog tuner is to tune into the UHF frequency carrier which has either a pulse code modulated signal or pulse width modulated signal on top of it. It isn't "digital" until the carrier is removed but from then on it is until it is converted to an analog signal for display purposes.

What is your understanding of any other digital tv that differs from that in th U.S.? As far as I can tell they are all based on similar principals but freq's and formats change from here to there.

I did semi realise that a digital signal is still an analogue signal over the air however what i meant is the actual tuner unit on the card, a single 'digital' tuner takes up the same room physically as a single 'analogue' tuner (the room the silver box on the card actually takes up), my kowledge of what is actually in those silver boxes is limited but it would seem to make sense that if you wanted a card that could pick up both dvb and analogue then you would need to double the size of the tuner (or at least half as much again from the first, to make room for the other components you would need), however i do know that these are starting to shrink in size (the pvr 500 has duel tuners which are the same length and width but are half the depth), hence my confusion as we have seperate dvb cards and analogue cards over here.

ahh I see. Maybe it has to do with the fact that our HDTV signals are UHF and so are the higher analog signals. That way the tuner can receive both it just needs to decode the digital signal a different way and that would take a minimal amount of components. Not sure just guessing. anyway when what how why is a pvr 500 can you spill some specs and release date or is this not allowed yet?

never mind found it with google. I was hoping the next pvr card would be atsc.