VIDEO I/O functions
Video-Out
Video-Out: For the usage of the video-functions a video
IN/OUT connection of a TV or video recorder (Scart/Cinch/S-VHS) is needed, because the
card has no own TV-Tuner. With an antenna connector alone nothing will work... ASUS
told me that there will soon be an external tuner-box available (including a remote
controller).
The board offers Video OUT at screen resolutions of 640x480
and 800x600. Thanks to the Chrontel 7003 Video Encoder chip the board can display monitor
and video-out simultaneously. So others can watch how stupid you play your games in the
living room. :) Other boards like the STB Velocity can do either TV or Monitor. |
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The simultaneous use is not perfect up to now.
The TNT Chip accelerates the mouse pointer via hardware, and thus it cannot be seen with
TV and monitor enabled. A 3DMARK99 test shows the simultaneous use costs a bit
performance, too. But is is fairly low: 1869 normal to 1839 dual. Sometimes a slight
flicker is in the TV picture. But with TV-only there are no problems. Even with the
highest flicker-filter 3DMark shows no slower values here. The mouce coursor is also
visible in this mode.
The quality of the TV-Out image is in both modes
identical - very good. The colors are strong and the image quality of excellent sharpness
(for a TV). The the picture position and brightness/contrast of the TV-Out picture can be
influenced via menu.
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Screenshots Video-Out
(click to enlarge) |
Video-In
The Video IN function offers
resolutions of 160x120 to 720x480 using the bundled software LIVE34000. But only in the
preview mode. The overlay mode uses only 352x288.
In practice you need the overlay mode to save
streames or images that come from your video/TV. But this mode has only a max resolutions
of 352x288. With Video-streams this is not much important, because harddisk performance is
the limiting factor here. |
LIVE 3400 Software
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You can hardly record a video with 352x288 and
25fps because of the large amount of data. A simple example: The PAL TV system works with
25 fps. A single picture in 352x288 needs uncompressed 300KB of disk space. With 25 fps
this is a datastream 7,5MB/second going to the harddisk, for a longer period... on
"real" video-cutting-boards like those of Miro and Fast the single frames are
compressed through a compression-chip (Zoran is a name here) in real time (Motion-JPEG) so
the amount of data is reduced. Thus the limited resolution of the V3400 is not a real
problem here. If you want to cut your holiday videos you need to buy a much more expensive
video cutting board.
But for single images I would have wanted a higher resolution
because you might want to transfer stills from a video camera into the computer. The
quality is not as high as with a digital camera, but not too bad at all...
In the preview mode (the pure View-mode) the picture can be
scaled and moved free with the LIV3400 Software. Fullscreen TV is possible, too. The
monitor becomes a TV here. But the use with other video viewers like Michael Tirtasanas
DeskTV is rather limited. ASUS will have to improve the drivers here, because you can only
use all features of the Video-IN with the LIVE3400 software. The highest resolution of
720x480 is a bit "narrow", and the capture (overlay) resolution should be
available in the full PAL format.
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