ATI HDTV Wonder...

[DarkWolf]

is fucking PIMP. I was just sitting there, watching some infomercial/telethon on PBS... because it's in hd. 4, 5, and 11 apparently don't have their HD broadcasts always on. David Letterman was running 1080i, but it looked like a stretched 480i, but Craig Kilborn right after that, was nice and crisp at 1080i. Channel 8 news rebroadcast on channel 52 was only running 480i (not sure why it picked up 4, 5, and 11, but not 8, instead it picked up 52 which seems to simulcast whatever wfaa is broadcasting... dunno. Maybe 52 is wfaa's hd channel, while 4, 5, and 11 do hd off their normal broadcast channels? If anyone with an hdtv would be so kind as to enlighten me :))

I'm actually amazed that the little shittling antenna that was included with the card, was actually picking up any signals at all, with as far out as I live. But it picked up a good 25 stations, about 15 of which had enough signal strength to watch smoothly.

I can definitely see I won't be recording any shows in full hdtv resolution/compression... 100ish gigs free on my drive, and that's only enough for about 30 minutes of recording :eek:. Though that's good for about 1 day at dvd quality, 2 days at svcd, and 4 days at vcd quality... so I think I'll be sticking to those presets for now :)

Now to get an actual hdtv instead of my Dell 2001FP. :D

[trey85stang]

sweet, There is a linux card I have been thinking about picking up.. but it doesnt offer any output to an hdtv which kinda sucks.

How is processor useage with that thing?? I have read that some will runa processor at 80% or ore the entire time.

[Hunt4m3x]

Same here. I can pick on my HDTV bigscreen TV ch. 4 5 11 13 21 27 and 33. FOr some reason, channel 33.1 and 33.2 cut into each other. Fucking pisses me off.

[DarkWolf]

Processor usage seems pretty low, only saw it hit a max of 30%, hovered around 22-25% for the most part. Though I haven't actually recorded anything yet, but it does seem like it's constantly in "tv-on-demand" mode, which would indicate it's always recording so you can pause/rewind/etc while watching live tv.

I was planning on doing the htpc with Linux, but then I remembered that I wouldn't be using it much (and the idea was to have one computer with linux to learn on, and the other computer with windows to have just incase I need to get something done that I can't figure out with linux), so I went ahead with the ATI card. Maybe Gatos will eventually fully support the hdtv wonder, and I'll put linux on it. For now though, I think I'll put linux on my laptop, and use vm ware or something for the few times when I need windows for something that I either can't find in linux, or can't get working under linux.

[momo stallion]

how much is this card?

[DarkWolf]

~$150ish