SnapStream Q&A – October 27th, 2005
October 27th, 2005 at 3:47 pm by rkuo
Will the ATI HD card allow a single card with HD OTA and analogue standard cable all in one PCI slot?
Let’s start with a little background. High definition tuners that combine both analog and high definition capture come in several flavors.
One approach is to simply have a digital capture card with no analog capture hardware whatsoever. No fuss, no muss. DVICO’s Fusion 5 HDTV Lite is an example of this type of card, and most USB HDTV tuners are also purely digital.
Another approach is known as a dual tuner approach, and basically looks to the operating system like two separate pieces of hardware…one for analog capture and one for digital capture. Both pieces of hardware can be used simultaneously. This is a good approach if the analog portion does hardware encoding to MPEG-2, but no company is currently implementing cards this way yet.
And finally, there is the hybrid approach. To the operating system, the capture hardware still appears to be two separate cards, but only one of the cards can be in use at any point in time. Presumably this saves on the cost of engineering two completely separate paths onto a single card.
Media Center Edition does not support the hybrid approach, basically operating under the assumption that you’re probably most interested in using only the high definition portion of the card anyway. That’s certainly something we understand…after all, mixing a software analog capture model and a digital capture model can be somewhat problematic from a usability standpoint. The ATI HDTV Wonder uses the hybrid approach.
Still, we have, in fact, gone ahead and taken some extra pains to make sure Beyond TV supports both the dual and hybrid tuner approaches. And you’ll just have to believe me when I say it took a lot of work. =) But the end result is that all approaches are fully operational in Beyond TV 4, subject to the limitations of the hardware approaches themselves. Be sure to look at our previous post to see partners that have teamed up with SnapStream to provide a premium HDTV PC experience.
One more note…while we do support hybrid cards, we still strongly recommend that you use a standard hardware encoder side by side with any HD capture card if you want to view or record standard definition content. One thing we’re fond of saying around here is that just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. Our experience is that offloading all of the capture work to the cards themselves is the best and most consistent way to create a great setup with Beyond TV.
Will the radio feature in BTV 4 support the display of the current song and its artist for the stations that transmit the information?
Definitely a cool feature, isn’t it? The mechanism for transmitting this data is known as RDS (Radio Data System). Unfortunately, this is a feature that must be supported via the operating system and hardware layers before we can add support for it in Beyond TV. The last time we looked into it, support was in the process of being created by Microsoft, but API’s for accessing this data aren’t quite ready yet. We’ll definitely continue to keep an eye on this as we move forward!
Remember, you can ask us questions by posting to our Q&A forum. We answer a couple of questions each week.
Richard Kuo
Chief Technology Officer