Is the Fusion HDTV3 Gold supported?

[medialivingroom]

http://www.dvico.com/products_mul_hd3.html

FusionHDTV3
¡Ñ HDTV reception and display
¡Ñ High resolution - crystal clear picture quality
¡Ñ Record HDTV stream on HDD
¡Ñ Provides the best VGA compatibility
¡Ñ High resolution still screen capture
¡Ñ ATSC 18 formats compliant
¡Ñ DVD/MPEG4(DivX) Conversion
¡Ñ Running on Windows ME/ 2000/ XP
¡Ñ Latest CX23881 chip set
¡Ñ No cable connection for Analog TV audio
10bit A/D
¡Ñ More buffer for better compatibility
¡Ñ Low profile for slim PC
¡Ñ Ulead Media Studio7SE DVD bundle for DVD writing
If you have any question about the product please email to this address hdtf@dvico.com




Highly Cost Effective
Full SW solution with minimum HW support
Using Conexant CX23881 and latest 4th Generation VSB tuner
Using Dvico's own HDTV decoder solution

High resolution, crystal clear picture quality
Provides ultimate picture quality experience on PC
(Please download demo to check the superb HDTV quality on your own system)
Good and crispy picture quality even on LCD and low resolution monitor

Dvico's proprietary HDTV SW decoder
Dvico's own dual HDTV software decorders for both non-DxVA and DxVA VGAs
Provides the best VGA compatibility with non DxVA full software decoder
Provides low CPU consumption with DxVA SW decoder
Dvico's own AC3, AAC Audio decoder

DVHS Supporting
Direct capture, playback and recording with DVHS
Direct DVHS transport control
Requires normal 1394 OHCI card
Requires Windows XP or later version for DVHS support

HDTV Recording
Record the digital TV contents directly on HDD and playback later
No 2G/4G limitation with recording
Cut on the fly cutting stream files directly on APP software

Minimum Requirement
Pentium 3 750MHz CPU (with ATi RADEON series with DxVA VGA, nVidia MX440, FX series)
Pentium 4 1.6GHz with DDR266 or faster memory for non DxVA VGA
Windows ME/ 2000/ XP or later version of Windows
-> To check your system for HDTV performance please download demo(Click!)

[edmc]

Alas, *still* no committed QAM support :-(

[stanger89]

AFAIK there are no HD cards officially supported yet. The Hipix and AccessDTV have "experimental" or "alpha" support.

[JJarmoc]

Well, the accessDTV *had* experimental support, unless anyone says they have it working with sage 2.0

[phenixdragon]

What a selling point.

Highly Cost Effective
Full SW solution with minimum HW support
Using Conexant CX23881 and latest 4th Generation VSB tuner
Using Dvico's own HDTV decoder solution

I haven't looked into the card in detail but it sounds like it is a software based card at about the same price at other hardware digital tuners.

[lovingHDTV]

they do say the tuner will support QAM 64 and 256, but have not had success in the US with it. So they are not advertising this as feature, but will continue to work on it.

It also appears to be low profile-able, nice feature.

[phenixdragon]

A review on this.

http://www.htpcnews.com/main.php?id=fusion3_1

[stanger89]

Originally posted by phenixdragon
What a selling point.

Highly Cost Effective
Full SW solution with minimum HW support
Using Conexant CX23881 and latest 4th Generation VSB tuner
Using Dvico's own HDTV decoder solution

I haven't looked into the card in detail but it sounds like it is a software based card at about the same price at other hardware digital tuners.

Yeah, the thing's only $10 less than an AccessDTV.

[stanger89]

Originally posted by lovingHDTV
they do say the tuner will support QAM 64 and 256, but have not had success in the US with it. So they are not advertising this as feature, but will continue to work on it.

It also appears to be low profile-able, nice feature.

Wonder if it's something with the card/software or if the cable companies are just encrypting everything.

[edmc]

Rather than try to replicate the 1000+ posts on AVSForum here, I'd just refer you to one such thread (>160 posts at this time):

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...hreadid=358743

Another poster just confirmed that QAM support will *not* be solveable in S/W.

Indeed, the engineering sample card I have is not identical to the FusionHDTV 3 Gold folks are talking about in that thread. Hence, my success at receiving 3 QAM256 stations is unique. But...

> Wonder if it's something with the card/software or if the cable companies are just encrypting everything.

In my case at least (Bay Area Comcast), I receive (at least) 3 channels (ABC, CBS, & NBC) unencrypted w/out even signing up for Digital Cable. Don't know about the Broadcast Flag ("BF"), but I don't believe the DViCo cards (or any other HD Tuner cards) check this yet.

AVSForum does have a substantial forum on HDTV Reception. Hundreds of threads target specific regions or local cable companies. One can certainly research their particular means of receiving HD there.

As for support within SageTV, I'd dearly love to see it. This has been discussed before. I've even lobbied DViCo to support it (i.e. publish a SDK like they do for their other products). Indeed, there is existence proof that such external control is possible - GotTV has a plug-in for the Fusion cards already.

[Sailn]

I have the fusionII and it is a great hdtv card. IMHO, QAM is a non-issue. Content owners just are not going to let you have access to their material without a secure signal path. A PC is anything but secure. What would really be nice would be a way to play the .tp files the fusion generates directly thru sage. Now I have to convert them to .mpg so I can watch them.

When you think about it, having sage support HDTV (provided the card manufactures would release detailed info about the card) should be that hard. The data stream from the cards is already conpressed and most newer graphics cards using DXVA have the horsepower to decode the stream (the integrated mx440 in my shuttle has no problem, and it is a rather weak GPU)

[stanger89]

Salin,

Just add .ts to the list of extensions in the sage.properties file, then they'll be imported into the library and you can try and play them. I'll caution you that this doesn't work very good now (some files work fine, others not at all). This seems to be the big thing keeping Sage from supportting HDTV. I think it's about the only thing stopping official support for the AccessDTV since Sage can record just fine from the ADTV.

The MX440 has some of the best HW accelleration of any Video card out there, might even be better than that on my Radeon 9500 (at least from a speed perspecitve).

[Sailn]

Stranger89, it might have to do with the way ATSC transport stream. As I understand it, all the sub channels are sent in one data stream. I would guess, and this is just a guess, that Sage is having a problem when there is more than 1 mpeg2 stream encoded in the transport stream. I will play around a bit an see what happens. There are sw based players in addition to the one that dvico supplies with the fusion card.

[stanger89]

Yeah, I don't know what the problem is, I just know I can play TS/TP/TRP files if I use the Elecard demux, but if I use the SageTV Demux instead I get studders. Plus, the Sage is unable to display a picture with the Heuris demo clips, and works with some of the Dvico demos but not others. I'm hoping that once 2.0 is released Jeff will have some more time to figure out the Demux issues and add in official and/or beta support for a few HD cards like the ADTV/Fusion III. The Fusion would be a good one since by adding one you probably almost automatically support the other two.

[lovingHDTV]

Here here.

Still hoping to get HDTV support after 2.0 release.

[ttriplett]

Originally posted by lovingHDTV
Here here.

Still hoping to get HDTV support after 2.0 release.

Let me second that:
Still hoping to get HDTV support after 2.0 release.

Especially for the Fusion III Gold and/or the ATI HDTV Wonder.

Any rumors?

[medialivingroom]

Bump

[jblust]

Just putting in a vote for the MyHD card....

[LarryFlint]

I don't know if this is the appropriate thread, but I'm not so much interested in recording OTA as well as simply recording from my STB. I have a dish 6000 HD receiver, so if the Dish does the tuning, I don't see any ports in the Divco card to simply pass through HD signals so that they can be recorded.

Any ideas?

LarryFlint

[stanger89]

Nothing can record uncompressed HD, your only options are OTA ATSC, over cable QAM, or via Firewire.