amiga-news.de - Elbox: TV as background

16.Oct.2001
Mariusz Wloczysiak (ANF) Elbox: TV as background
Elbox Computer is pleased to inform that Amiga with the Mediator busboard is from now on the first hardware, in which displaying the actual and moving at full speed real TV broadcasting picture in the backdrop has become possible.

Mediator PCI is now the only PCI busboard for Amiga, whose users may use TV cards. Apart from this fact, Mediator PCI is also a pathfinder for new quality standards in the way PCI TV cards are used in computers.

Displaying the full-quality TV picture with absolutely 100% system performance maintained (irrespective whether you use a turbo card with PPC/68060 or with 68030) is now possible with the special method of storing code for the video capturing processor.

The fast SDRAM/SGRAM memory of graphic cards, to which the TV card sends the digitalised television picture is used in Mediator PCI also to store program for the TV-card video and audio capture processor. This means that none of the operations related to generating the picture requires any operation outside the PCI bus.

Therefore, performance of TV cards is significantly enhanced when compared against other computers with PCI TV cards, in which the video capture processors must take their code from the computer's main memory.

Inventing this method of co-operation between TV cards and graphic cards has become possible due to the effort of our in-house team of programmers, who have written drivers for both graphic and TV cards.

Software for TV cards for Mediator, which now supports as many as 50 of the most popular PCI TV cards, enables a series of different methods of displaying television image.

The basic method is to display the image in the window of the pre-set size from the range of 96x72 to 768x576. Any size of window may be freely scalable at any time. Scaling the TV picture is executed in real time with the PCI graphic card's hardware.

When the TV image is displayed as a backdrop, the user may freely define the colour, which will be automatically replaced by the graphic card with the moving television image.

The enclosed screenshots show television picture samples in Amiga with Mediator PCI.

Software for TV cards in Mediator enables a number of other additional functions, which the TV card may perform.

For example: managing the radio tuner integrated with the card or using the TV card as a scandoubler / flickerfixer for displaying the AGA-generated image in the PCI graphic card screen.

The software to enable operation of any supported TV card in the backdrop mode will be made available today to all the registered users of the Mediator Multimedia CD package as an update, free of any charge.

Mariusz Wloczysiak
ELBOX COMPUTER, Press Department (sd)

[News message: 16. Oct. 2001, 15:59] [Comments: 0]
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