ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner: AMD and Dell Bring CableCARD to PCs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 3, 2007 11:37 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Performance
Although Dell sent a beefy system for our OCUR evaluation, it turns out that you actually need that sort of a system for decent performance when recording/watching HDTV. To recap, Dell's XPS 410 was configured with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz), 2GB of memory, and two 500GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration.
With two 500GB drives running in RAID 0, the XPS 410 left us with just under 1TB of total storage. While Vista MCE allows you the ability to adjust quality settings for all analog recordings, digital broadcasts can only be recorded in the bitrate it was originally broadcast in. We recorded an hour-long episode of the show 24, broadcast in 720p; the resulting file size was a whopping 4.73GB for a single show. In its default configuration, the 1TB of storage offered by the XPS 410 gave us the ability to record a maximum of 104 hours of HD content.
It sounds like a lot, but once you start factoring in installed applications and games, you almost need a dedicated 500GB or 1TB of storage just for your recorded content. Thankfully, hard drives are cheap, but when even 1TB of space is used up quickly, it's still a concern. The ability to compress the content to some lower bitrate (but still high quality) video standard would be very useful, but performance requirements for even a single HD stream would be very high for real-time encoding. Quad core and even octal core CPUs could change the situation, however.
Much like previous versions of MCE, CPU requirements are also high when it comes to OCUR and Vista MCE. CPU utilization while watching an HD broadcast can easily average 50% of our Core 2 Duo E6700, one of the fastest dual core CPUs currently available; recording used about half of that. Streaming HD content to a single Xbox 360 ate up around 20% of the E6700's available cycles.
Needless to say, you need a good amount of CPU power if you want a single or dual tuner OCUR system to be used for more than just watching HDTV. If you've wanted to know what a quad core CPU could be useful for, here's another very good example.
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DigitalFreak - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Uh.. I don't think you understand how these things work. The only inputs on the 650 & AIW are composite and S-video. Neither is going to allow you to record anything in HD from your cable box. The HD support on the 650 is only for OTA.BPB - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
You know, until now I thought the AIW X1900 had YPrPb input. Man, I need to wake up!TheTerl - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
I was amused by the choice in movies. After all, who wouldn't want to check out "Boinking in the Dorm Room" at work? With a title like that, I'm sure it's a cinematic masterpiece.Aside from that, very interesting article.
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Thing is, it may show up in the guide, but you can't actually order it... :0)WileCoyote - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Only Anand can turn an article I would normally ingore into a fun and interesting read. Good stuff!MercenaryForHire - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Agreed. While I have nothing but distaste for this hardware, its related metric assload of DRM tie-ins, and lack of DIY support, I enjoyed reading the review of it immensely.pjladyfox - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
"why on earth would you go through this when you can just rent an HD-DVR from us for $9 a month?"I think this pretty much sums up the entire system to begin with. It really does make me wonder if the unholy alliance (read: MPAA/RIAA/Cable/Telco) is making the use of CableCard-based devices more difficult than it needs to be. The number of people that were called on-site just to resolve the multiple issues is a rather telling statement that while the tech may be great it is being set up to fail in the marketplace.
And why was there no provision for HDMI input? I mean, it was designed with HDCP encryption in mind so I would have thought this would have been a no-brainer but if I had to guess I would say the unholy alliance shot that idea down real quick. -_-
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
Cable companies are required by the FCC to provide cable cards upon request. However, it's pretty obvious they make it as difficult as possible to get them up and running ($42.95 install fee?).tuteja1986 - Tuesday, April 3, 2007 - link
I hope the person incharge of this project reads this because he needs to get up his lazy ass and start sloving these issue by getting the right dude to slove this problems. Then ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner + VISTA MCE will succeed or Hollywood could just kill DRM which would make life easier on their loyal customer.