Newest Marvel is up on Matrox's website

[Bixler]

http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/marv_g450_etv/home.cfm

Looks like the big diff is that they are going to SOFTWARE Mpeg2 rendering. Any of you heavy hitters over here care to comment?

Haig had an interesting exchange with a MURCER over on MH on the subject here:http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/009437.html

Check it out!



[This message has been edited by Bixler (edited 20 September 2000).]

[harry]

wow!!! min requirements for time shifting
600mhz????? alot of cpu crunching...
is this purely software power?

harry

[Bixler]

Yeah, Harry. That looks to be the ticket. No mention of Hardware rendering that I could find.

Interesting that they would go this way. I may be considering it just cause I'm itchy to get past the g200 graphics bottleneck (I have a Marvel G200 TV,) but I was kinda counting on Hardware rendering of some kind. My 750 Athlon meets the minimum spec, but this makes me kinda cautious...you know how specs are.

I'd really appreciate some commentary on this from the frequent posters over here.

[Dr Mordrid]

The MPEG-2 captures work and work rather well.

The CPU horsepower required is a bit higher than for PICVideo MJPeg or HuffYUV. This is largely due to the temporal compression used with MPEG's, which adds to the CPU loading. A CPU with SIMD instructions is highly recommended, so the PIII, Celeron-II, Athlon and Duron are the orders of the day.

I've used MPEG-2 captures with both a PIII/850 and Celeron-II/600. The PIII had no problem keeping up with any setting. The C-II couln't do full frame (704x480) but 352x480 was a cinch.

My guesstimate is that a C-II/700 should be enough for full frame given a good platform & fast memory. The Duron/750 should certainly be enough. Fortunately the Celeron-II and Duron chips are very affordable upgrades.

There are a lot of neat features in those drivers....

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 19 September 2000).]

[harry]

Well. for alternative just get a cheap
DVC2 from Dazzle(299) at least using C-cube

harry

[Dr Mordrid]

1. The Dazzle will work on a lower spec'ed machine BUT;

2. It's nowhere near as flexible. You'll understand this better later....

Dr. Mordrid

[Nick Piercey]

Hi Doc,

Please tell us more...

I'm still with a Mystique220/RRS and it's associated "evil frames"! Couldn't get a Marvel 400 to work properly.. green lines followed by green flashes!

I'm currently saving for a RT2000 or a DV500.

I only want to tape a few things off the TV and edit holidays and "nephews and nieces" stuff from my Hi 8.

How does this new gadget shape up compared to full resolution Mjpeg?

What's the max bitrate it can encode?

Does it work OK with MSPro 6?

Can it function with other soft codecs (DV, huffy, etc)?

Can it capture straight to mpeg?

If you're taping a long movie from the TV, are there gaps between files or would you still need AVI_IO?

So many questions... sorry!?!


Thanks, Doc.


Kind regards,


Nick.

[RBryant]

So Doc, will this thing do YUY2 then so that we can capture straight to DiVX? I'm assuming since it's software only that it ONLY does YUY2 or raw RGB from the hardware... so it should be able to capture to any codec just about...

tell us more about the time shifting... have you used it? does it support vcr plus or anything like that or do we have to plug in the time of everything that we want to record.... does it support weekly recurring events? how does the MPEG-2 HONESTLY look? what are the different settings, bitrates, etc? And what about sound? only pcm? or will it support any installed codec like wma or mp3 or divx audio?

Thanks Doc! You're the best!

Garrett

[Phire]

I think Matrox is going downhill now, and I think software MPEG-2 was a TERRIBLE decision. First off all, we can already do Software MPEG-2 with the right cpu, and I'm assuming the professional hardware MPEG-2 encoders offer some sort of advantage. Doesn't the RT2000 offer a special colorspace?. I had hoped they would use the next revision of MJPEG, the one that used Wavelet compression.

[harry]

ATI introduced the first time shifting
product (Video Wonder $179 with tuner/ccube) but pullout in very last minute without any reason.

[Questor]

Dr Mordrid,

If you can awnser. Will the new Matrox VCR 2.0 software still work with the RR-G units? If so then we could also be able to capture MPEG-2 as long as we have a fast processor?

If not, can we still use the 2.0 software with some features disabled?

Questor

[Emergencybroadcast]

Anyone know if they'll be PCI versions of the G450, expecially the eTV.


It'd be really nice to have a card that will do TV capture and dualhead but not take up the AGP slot so a faster 3D card could be put there (eg. G400 MAX).

[jeff b]

Wow! Another big Matrox product release announcement!

http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/marv_g450_etv/availability.cfm

I remember the big product announcement they made for the RT2000 at the beginning of August 1999... and it didn't hit the streets until the end of January 2000. So, based on that, I predict that the G450-eTV will probably not be ready for the holiday season. Then, when it DOES finally get released, it won't work right (for anyone except the truly patient and computer savvy) until the second generation of drivers are released somewhere around next spring.

But don't mind me, I'm just pointing out their track record on this type of stuff.

Another really great link for Matrox bashers is the product support PR page:

http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/marv_g450_etv/prod_support.cfm

...kinda reminds me of George Orwell's "1984"...

Jeff B

[Riddek]

Hi, I bought a G400 Marvel a couple of weeks back because of the superior quality of MJPEG capture over MPEG2. Then I found out about HuffYUV thanks to a few regular posters here, which surpasses the quality of MJPEG.

Since HuffYUV doesn't require a hardware codec, I'm wondering if I should return the G400 Marvel and get on the waiting list for a G450 eTV.(the Marvel is still sealed in the box)

Besides the time shifting and software(?) MPEG2 codec, is the G450 eTV "superior" to the G400 Marvel? Does it have better dualhead capabilities? (I'm upgrading my CPU & mobo this weekend, so processing power shouldn't be a consideration)
Thanks!

[bongo]

2 questions:

1...I know the new 450 card has dual head...but does anyone know if the dualhead support 2 computer monitors...or just one monitor and a TV...I hope not

2....I already have a G400max agp with the fast ramdac (and DH)...is the new 450 faster or slower?

thnks