neo_sapien
17th December 2002, 15:29
MyHD MDP-100 HDTV PCI Decoder Card (http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Video/myhd.asp)
Installation of the MyHD card was a snap. It was a bit tricky getting the thing into a PCI slot because it's about 10" long, and therefore got in the way of some of my ribbon cables, however.
I *did not* run the included internal audio cable from the card's audio out to my sound card's line in, for fear of shorting out my Audigy Platinum like I did when I tried the same thing on a WinTV Radio.
For sound, I ran a coaxial cable from my Dolby Digital receiver to the coax port on the MyHD card. This gives me a direct Dolby Digital stream when I switch the receiver to "Coaxial" (from Digital DIN) and the card's software is running.
The MyHD card requires that the monitor be connected directly to it, and an external pass-thru cable then connects to your VGA card as well. The whole thing is very easy to do, and it's reminiscent of the pass-thru cable on an old 3Dfx Voodoo2 card, except for there's also an analog sources pod connected to the pass-thru cable.
The card comes with a remote control, the receiver of which connects to your old-fashioned 15-pin serial port, which is definitely a drawback for those people who don't have legacy ports on their motherboards. In my case I had to go back into my BIOS and re-enable a serial port, which is unfortunate because the darn things take up 1 IRQ each. Nevertheless, the remote control works very well, and requires no additional drivers or background applications to be running in order to use it, unlike the Audigy Platinum remote control.
Hooking up analog sources to the MyHD card is a snap, because a connector is included which allows for the direct connection of an S-Video cable, in addition to all 3 normal RCA (composite) cables. All you have to do in order to watch the S-Video or RCA signal is click on "Video In". Unfortunately, capturing from these analog sources seems to be somewhat tricky. In my test capture of a 1-minute long segment of CNN from S-Video/RCA from my DirecTV decoder at 720x480 MJPEG 19, PCM I got about 5 dropped frames. The highest resolution I could capture w/out dropped frames was 352x288. Using a WinTV Radio with the excellent Btwincap drivers from Koepi, I was able to get 752x480 (the NTSC maximum res) at MJPEG 19/PCM with no dropped frames. Using the 1.55.3 drivers, I'm pretty much unable to use Virtualdub for analog capture. Here (http://home.covad.net/~wlabiche/myhd/analog_capture_vdub.jpg) is a still from a drop-frame-ridden (95 of them) 5 second test capture from a very clean S-Video source. Scramble city.
EDIT~Then again, color calibration is hard on this card too. I just can't get it to the right level. Agggh, at least no calibration is necessary for transport streams.
Color Calibration for analog sources, at first glance, seems to be far less problematic than with the WinTV Radio card, which displayed unsaturated, muddy images, or oversaturated, overbright images and STILL muddy images if you tried to calibrate it. All you have to do to get a get good color calibration is go to Video Controls and set them to "Analog Video". At first glance, this returns properly colorful images, better than the WinTV Radio.
Capturing HDTV transport streams is relatively painless. From the MyHD application (or from your remote), just push the record button (duh :p). I'm able to capture full quality transport streams even with poor signal strength (just strong enough to give you unfragmented video & audio). A problem comes in later on, though. The MyHD captures to .tp files, which PVAstrumento can't read, nor can DVD2AVIT3, even when you give it the audio & video PIDs in the ini file (HDTVtoMPEG2 gives you the PID numbers). DVD2AVIT3 just crashes right off the bat upon an attempt to load the .tp file. However, HDTVtoMPEG2 (http://www.inmatrix.com/articles/atsc7.shtml) pretty much flawlessly converts the .tp files to .mpg files, which can then be read by DVD2AVI 1.76, but not by PowerDVD (probably because they're not dvd compliant mpeg-2). It's a pain though, because you need twice as much HD space.
You'll likely need a big antenna to get lots of HD channels. Using a $40 crappy indoor antenna from Radio Shack (Amplified VHF/UHF/FM antenna, cat no. 15-1838) I'm able to receive 3 channels in good quality, and detect the presence of a 4th (PBS), but not receive it. There are about 10 digital stations within 15 miles of me (I'm in Mongtomery County, Maryland, USA), but perhaps most of them are transmitting with a very weak signal. I've seen on the AVS forums that my local UPN affiliate is transmitting with the strength of a walkie-talkie. Naturally, I'm thinking of upgrading my antenna to a roof-mounted model, but I'm weary of spending 5x as much on installation as on the actual antenna.
The MyHD card offers DVD playback as one of its features, but it just doesn't work. Popping in Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Cut, I found that playback was stuttering and unbearable, with the video and dolby digital signals cutting in and out. I'll stick to PowerDVD XP 4.0, thank you.
Installation of the MyHD card was a snap. It was a bit tricky getting the thing into a PCI slot because it's about 10" long, and therefore got in the way of some of my ribbon cables, however.
I *did not* run the included internal audio cable from the card's audio out to my sound card's line in, for fear of shorting out my Audigy Platinum like I did when I tried the same thing on a WinTV Radio.
For sound, I ran a coaxial cable from my Dolby Digital receiver to the coax port on the MyHD card. This gives me a direct Dolby Digital stream when I switch the receiver to "Coaxial" (from Digital DIN) and the card's software is running.
The MyHD card requires that the monitor be connected directly to it, and an external pass-thru cable then connects to your VGA card as well. The whole thing is very easy to do, and it's reminiscent of the pass-thru cable on an old 3Dfx Voodoo2 card, except for there's also an analog sources pod connected to the pass-thru cable.
The card comes with a remote control, the receiver of which connects to your old-fashioned 15-pin serial port, which is definitely a drawback for those people who don't have legacy ports on their motherboards. In my case I had to go back into my BIOS and re-enable a serial port, which is unfortunate because the darn things take up 1 IRQ each. Nevertheless, the remote control works very well, and requires no additional drivers or background applications to be running in order to use it, unlike the Audigy Platinum remote control.
Hooking up analog sources to the MyHD card is a snap, because a connector is included which allows for the direct connection of an S-Video cable, in addition to all 3 normal RCA (composite) cables. All you have to do in order to watch the S-Video or RCA signal is click on "Video In". Unfortunately, capturing from these analog sources seems to be somewhat tricky. In my test capture of a 1-minute long segment of CNN from S-Video/RCA from my DirecTV decoder at 720x480 MJPEG 19, PCM I got about 5 dropped frames. The highest resolution I could capture w/out dropped frames was 352x288. Using a WinTV Radio with the excellent Btwincap drivers from Koepi, I was able to get 752x480 (the NTSC maximum res) at MJPEG 19/PCM with no dropped frames. Using the 1.55.3 drivers, I'm pretty much unable to use Virtualdub for analog capture. Here (http://home.covad.net/~wlabiche/myhd/analog_capture_vdub.jpg) is a still from a drop-frame-ridden (95 of them) 5 second test capture from a very clean S-Video source. Scramble city.
EDIT~Then again, color calibration is hard on this card too. I just can't get it to the right level. Agggh, at least no calibration is necessary for transport streams.
Color Calibration for analog sources, at first glance, seems to be far less problematic than with the WinTV Radio card, which displayed unsaturated, muddy images, or oversaturated, overbright images and STILL muddy images if you tried to calibrate it. All you have to do to get a get good color calibration is go to Video Controls and set them to "Analog Video". At first glance, this returns properly colorful images, better than the WinTV Radio.
Capturing HDTV transport streams is relatively painless. From the MyHD application (or from your remote), just push the record button (duh :p). I'm able to capture full quality transport streams even with poor signal strength (just strong enough to give you unfragmented video & audio). A problem comes in later on, though. The MyHD captures to .tp files, which PVAstrumento can't read, nor can DVD2AVIT3, even when you give it the audio & video PIDs in the ini file (HDTVtoMPEG2 gives you the PID numbers). DVD2AVIT3 just crashes right off the bat upon an attempt to load the .tp file. However, HDTVtoMPEG2 (http://www.inmatrix.com/articles/atsc7.shtml) pretty much flawlessly converts the .tp files to .mpg files, which can then be read by DVD2AVI 1.76, but not by PowerDVD (probably because they're not dvd compliant mpeg-2). It's a pain though, because you need twice as much HD space.
You'll likely need a big antenna to get lots of HD channels. Using a $40 crappy indoor antenna from Radio Shack (Amplified VHF/UHF/FM antenna, cat no. 15-1838) I'm able to receive 3 channels in good quality, and detect the presence of a 4th (PBS), but not receive it. There are about 10 digital stations within 15 miles of me (I'm in Mongtomery County, Maryland, USA), but perhaps most of them are transmitting with a very weak signal. I've seen on the AVS forums that my local UPN affiliate is transmitting with the strength of a walkie-talkie. Naturally, I'm thinking of upgrading my antenna to a roof-mounted model, but I'm weary of spending 5x as much on installation as on the actual antenna.
The MyHD card offers DVD playback as one of its features, but it just doesn't work. Popping in Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Cut, I found that playback was stuttering and unbearable, with the video and dolby digital signals cutting in and out. I'll stick to PowerDVD XP 4.0, thank you.