The dark side..............

[WMTJ]

Well, after being w/o a TV in my room for 2 months I finally caved and bought an AIW Radeon! Damn, Matrox sure has spoiled me because I sure know high quality when I'm not looking at it. Speed is good though, but not a night and day difference. Watching TV on my 19" moniter is decent enough until I get a HDTV next April or whenever I get my tax refund.

Point. Matrox will get more of my money as soon as I see a similar "AIW" like card with this type of speed!

Come G800.......Come Quickly!


WMTJ

[Guru]

You know you could have bought a cheap Haupage TV tuner card!

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Don't get even — get odd!

[WMTJ]

I know but I wanted to enjoy my 19" monitor w/ games. Besides, I was getting sick of all the hoopla I've been hearing about frame rates! Well they are not King! I've learned one hell of a lesson!

I will have to give it as much of a chance as I did my faithfull G400. Some tweaking and what not and then I'll see if Radeons are what they're cracked up to be.

WMTJ

[Himself]

Perhaps it's not the video card, perhaps you need a cpu upgrade.

[PC001]

@Guru

1 video card + 1 haupage + 1 video compression card = 3 PCI slots gone

PC

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Webmaster of 8Dimensional
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review listings for: Radeon, G450, GeForce2 GTS, Voodoo5 and many more....

[ayoub_ibrahim]

quoted from PC001 : "1 video card + 1 haupage + 1 video compression card = 3 PCI slots gone"
does this mean you have a pci G400?

[rubank]

pc001,

does USB sound familiar to you?

[DGhost]

The Raedons/All-In-Wonders do hardware compression? Right.....

[PC001]

- AGP is nothing than a better PCI
- USB...for video ?
- the AIW supports realtime video compression

PC

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Webmaster of 8Dimensional
daily news, hype-news and graphics card opinions
review listings for: Radeon, G450, GeForce2 GTS, Voodoo5 and many more....

[Indiana]

Hmm, I can do full PAL resolution captures (768x576x32@25fps) with realtime compression of the video using the PicVideo software MJPEG codec and simultaneous MP3 compression for the audio on my Hauppauge WinTV - so why would I need HW compression?

[xortam]

Matrox came to the same conclusion with their latest TV card. Now a couple vendors are about to ship HDTV decoding and capture.

[DGhost]

the AIW does SOFTWARE video compression. read any review of the cards. look at the specs. does it say anywhere that it does hardware compression? NO!

Also, AGP is an 'expanded' pci, but you cannot use an AGP card in a PCI slot. thus PCI != AGP.

And yes, you can do USB video capture/tv tuning/etc. i wouldn't, but i'm picky.

[Wombat]

Sorry PC, but AGP is a good bit more than PCI, especially if you're using Matrox products (DiME).

[PC001]

- PCI/AGP...there was a smily
- USB has a little bandwidth problem at full res. 32bit
- MJEPG ? ...if video at all then MPEG 2
- hmmm....software compression...yes, but MPEG 2 - decompression in hw

PC

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Webmaster of 8Dimensional
daily news, hype-news and graphics card opinions
review listings for: Radeon, G450, GeForce2 GTS, Voodoo5 and many more....

[DGhost]

Didn't say usb was good, but you can and it works fairly well.

MJPEG works fairly well and is not overly processor intensive...

And saying that the Raedon has hardware DVD decoding is like saying that integrated audio on motherboards is up to spec with a $70 sound card. it is hardware assisted, same as all the other video cards on the market, but is still not a hardware DVD decode. Acctually, it is slight better than most video cards on the market, but it is still not a hardware DVD decoder, nor does it compare to one.

I still don't know what the big deal about MPEG2 encoding is. its not like you can take your MPEG2 video, burn it to a DVD-RW and play it in a DVD player. There are other things that have to happen for you to be able to do that. things that cost enough money that i doubt we will be seeing it on the home market. Big thanks go to the DVD consortium for ensuring that you cannot make your own DVD cheaply and easily.

Makes MJPEG look pretty good.