some lite reading.. and more chance for confidence.
There's a little something about our friends at Hauppauge here.
Box Tops make Television more like computers while DTV receiver cards (hopefully with WaveMeters) would make Personal Computers more like Digital TV.. Will our WaveMeter be on these circuit cards for PC's?
Looks as though Hauppauge has the competition beat on price.
MATSUSHITA'S U.S.-BASED Panasonic Industrial Co. unit worked with Compaq Computer Corp., Houston, to design its DTV accessory for PCs, and Compaq said it will sell the product to consumers early next year. However, Compaq doesn't plan to offer the card as a standard item until digital broadcasting becomes more popular, said Trey Smith, a vice president in the company's consumer group.
Panasonic will make the product in Japan. The first version will be composed of two circuit cards and be sold to manufacturers for $800 to $1,000. By contrast, circuit cards that are used in PCs to receive ordinary, or analog, television signals carry a retail price of $150 to $250.
Philips Semiconductors, a U.S. unit of Dutch-based Philips, said it has developed a design for DTV receiver cards, but will leave manufacturing and marketing to others. By shifting most of the DTV signal decoding duties to the PC's main microprocessor, the Philips card uses fewer chips and will cost less than Panasonic's.
Philips aims for its card to have a retail price of $200 by the end of next year, said Simon Wegerif, a product manager. Its performance, however, will be more contingent upon the microprocessor speed and other attributes of a PC.
PC circuit-card maker Hauppauge Digital Inc. signed up to use Philips's technology, people familiar with the matter said. A spokesman for Hauppauge declined to discuss Philips, but said the company will soon sell DTV reception cards to PC manufacturers.
In future versions of its DTV accessory for PCs, Panasonic plans to move audio and data processing to the computer. Concentrating functions in the microprocessor so improvements can be made in software is essential, said Sai Naimpally, vice president at Panasonic's digital-TV laboratory in Burlington, N.J. But he added, video processing will take longer to migrate because of its complexity.
Computer manufacturers for several years have touted the PC as a way to quickly spread the reception of digital-TV signals. Computer monitors display more video information than today's televisions and, in general, don't need modification, as televisions do, to show high-definition pictures.
Take care,
Marty
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