Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 10:25:43 -0500 From: "Karen L. Comer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: USB TV Tuner
What Raymond heard is basically true. I bought an AVER USB TV Tuner device and it wouldn't even do well on my desktop computer. The video broke up or stopped completely a lot even when I wasn't doing anything else. (And most of us ARE doing something else when watching TV on a computer else we would be sitting comfortably in front of a REAL TV!). I gave up on it and continued using my card tuner. -------------------- 6 -------------------- Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 08:35:30 +0800 From: Raymond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LIB] TV Card on a 110CT... At 12:28 PM 15/11/2001 -0800, you wrote: >Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 20:27:20 -0000 >From: "Jon C" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: TV Card on a 110CT... > >Folks, > >I was wondering about (purchasing and then) connecting up a USB TV Card to my 110CT via my Belkin USB adaptor. Anyone tried this??? Well I was considering getting one for my desktop in preparation for using it on a bigger laptop I'll be getting late next year (possibly a Dell Inspiron 8100) but decided against it because of the following reasons (note all of this is second hand knowledge, from reading reviews and talking to a few friends who HAVE got USB capture devices): 1: A basic video/audio in device costs as much as a fully featured internal TV tuner (I know this isn't relevant for the Libby). Bear in mind that the Belkin USB VideoBus (which is what I'm assuming you're referring to) is a video and audio line level device - to watch TV you'll also need a tuner. Of coures, if you're referring to the Belkin PVRC (personal video recorder) which has a built in tuner (as well as virtually everything else!) then you're fine in that regard (but you'll still have problem 3, besides which a little handheld TV is probably cheaper than the PVRC!). If you ARE going that route though, I believe Hauppage and a few other companies have a considerably cheaper device than the PVRC (and not much more expensive than the VideoBus) which have inbuilt tuners (but they'll all have the problems mentioned below). 2: Most systems only convert video and shove that through the USB port. You stream audio through the sound card. Problem is, because USB isn't fast enough for video streaming, the device needs to compress the video (often a fast hardware implementation of MPEG compression) then your computer has to decompress it at the other end so video is delayed from audio by about 1/4 of a second on a fast computer (possibly longer on something like an older Libby) - enough to drive you nuts when lipsync fails. I think the Belkin device does both audio and video through the USB cable so this MIGHT solve the lipsync problem but it'll compound problem 3. 3: Even with compression, it appears that even on fast computers (500MHz or so) USB video devices saturate the USB system ie. you can't have ANYTHING else plugged into the same USB root hub and expect decent performance. Certainly on a 110CT (which I believe has a 200MHz processor?) I don't think the processor would be able to keep up with both the IO involved in the USB port AND decompression the MPEG stream coming through the USB port AND saving it to disk or whatever ... either it'll drop frames like crazy, cause annoying pauses, lose audio sync and/or saturate the processor (so you couldn't do anything ELSE with it). Anyway thats what I've heard, none of this is first-hand experience (my libby is a 50CT so USB isn't even an option!) so if anyone else can see problems/omissions do speak up! - Raymond ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://libretto.basiclink.com/archive - Archives http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/portable/faq.html - FAQ -------TO UNSUBSCRIBE------- Reply to any of the list messages. The reply mail should be addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Then replace any text on the message's subject line: cmd:unsubscribe --------TO UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Do above but with this on subject line: cmd:unsubscribe digest **************************************************************
