TV Tuner AGP Card / Matrox Marvel G450 eTV BOXED (2000)

Beschrijving

Montreal, Canada, September 19, 2000 – Matrox Graphics Inc. today introduced the Matrox Marvel G450 eTV, the most comprehensive all-in-one graphics card for consumers in the home entertainment and SOHO PC markets.

The Marvel G450 eTV gives consumers the power to do it all, from watching timeshifted TV on the PC to creating their own videos for the Web. Equipped with 32 MB of Double Data Rate (DDR)* memory and a 360 MHz primary RAMDAC, this feature-packed AGP 2X/4X card powers stereo TV tuning, MPEG-2 video capture and editing, TV on the PC, PC out to TV, DVD playback, 2D applications, 3D gaming, dual displays, and more.

“We are excited to see an all-in-one video card that harnesses the high-performance power of the AMD Athlon™ processor while also providing value-conscious AMD Duron™ users access to a wide variety of features,” said Ned Finkle, Director, Infrastructure Enablement Group for AMD. “Matrox’s Marvel G450 eTV has all the necessary tools for bringing high quality video and enhanced TV tuning to all AMD equipped PCs.”

“With PC/TV convergence, broadband, and powerful processors steadily pervading today’s households, we’re seeing heightened demand for a new kind of Marvel card,” said Dan Wood, vice president of technical marketing, Matrox Graphics Inc. “People want more control over the way they watch TV. They want the ability to create personalized video content for the Web. And, they want a strong all-around accelerator for their entertainment and SOHO applications.”

The Marvel G450 eTV is perfectly timed to respond to market demand, bringing features like timeshifting to the PC at a fraction of the price of a set-top box. The Marvel G450 eTV goes beyond all other cards in its category by offering consumers new and exhilarating ways to watch TV on the PC as well as enhanced all-in-one functionality using DualHead Display.

Matrox’s DualHead technology allows Marvel G450 eTV users to pair their computer with a TV for simultaneous independent output to two display screens. Because the monitor’s refresh rate can be set independently of the TV, the monitor is always flicker-free for the highest quality viewing.

The Marvel G450 eTV is based on Matrox’s Millennium G450 core. By today’s standards the G450 core carries no potential as a gaming solution, not able to outperform even a NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra. But as Matrox really opened this market up with their Marvel series it was definitely worth including.

The Marvel G450 eTV was the first card of its kind not to require any external breakout boxes for the input and output ports. A single analog Philips TV tuner was present on the card as well a 10-pin output connector and an 8-pin input connector. Matrox supplied two dongles that split the two connectors into S-Video and RCA inputs and outputs as well as one 1/8″ output to the sound card.

The rest of the PCB was a relatively simple design with only a single chip complementing the G450 core and its four DDR SDRAM chips; that single chip is a Samsung made TV encoder chip that also handled video capture. A smaller chip made by Micronas handles the sound processing for TV reception

Matrox put a considerable amount of effort into the development of their PC-VCR software. The PC-VCR interface is extremely easy to use and serves as the sole conduit for watching TV and capturing live TV to your computer.

The software allows you to encode directly to MPEG-2 files but unfortunately only offers three resolutions to record at: 352×240, 352×480, 704×480. As if that weren’t constraining enough, Matrox only offers three bit rates to encode with – SLP: 0.63 MB/s, LP: 0.83 MB/s and SP: 1.02 MB/s. It’s clear that the PC-VCR wasn’t intended for heavy use and can’t match up to some of the newer offerings from ATI and NVIDIA.