I have the Miro-Media-View with Mpeg-Decoder and TV-Upgrade.

Seems the Upgrade is the same.

You can use it to watch analog TV.
FBAS and S-Video are inputs.
Only the 3,5mm is an Output for the Audio.

You can also connect an Sat-receiver or an VCR to it.
Maybe some game consoles
Videotext / Teletext should also work.

Yes, you can use it as a capture device for PAL/NTSC signals over composite or s-video (bypassing the TV tuner part).
So if you want to make video captures of old consoles, home computers, or CGA/PCjr/Tandy composite computers, you could use such a card.

As a video card, it's not bad, just a standard S3 Trio64V+-based card, which was a reasonable Windows-accelerator at the time, and has good (S)VGA compatibility for DOS as well.

The S3 Scenic/MX2 chip on there is an MPEG decoder chip, so it's probably also great for watching CD-Video/DVD stuff on a low-end PC.

I actually think the TV tuner part is the most useful. Because it could record obscure video game consoles or ancient computers that only output a modulated rf signal.

With recent gear that's impossible without adding a separate VCR or demodulator in the chain.

All the other features can be done better on newer hardware, but I know nostalgia makes us retro guys do crazy things. 😊

Interesting, can an old computer, for example an pentium 133MHz, really record such video with out problems? 😀

Stojke wrote:

Interesting, can an old computer, for example an pentium 133MHz, really record such video with out problems? 😀

Depending on how fast the HDD is, what resolution you use, and what kind of compression you apply, it might be able to.
Some early capture cards would have per-frame compression in hardware, to reduce the bus load (the Video Blaster could record video even over an ISA bus on a 386 or 486 system).
I guess you'd have to check what minimum requirements Miro advised for TV capture of this card. P133 might be a bit on the slow side, but I think a PII or PIII would do fine.

That card can't record video. Only still images can be Captured.
It displays the Video live in a Window or Fullscreen.

Also the Mpeg Decoder chip only decodes Mpeg1. (Video-CD Format, and CD-i).
Was great to watch Fullscreen Video in color with my Pentium75.

My Pentium 200 with Software Decode, only gets around 15 fps in Color or 25 fps in Black/White.

I connected a C64 to the input but the Picture was moving, from down to up (or up to down) because the C64 signal is not Standard.
But other consoles should work (nintendo, sega, anything with RF-output or scart)

Sammy wrote:

That card can't record video. Only still images can be Captured.
It displays the Video live in a Window or Fullscreen.

If it displays the video, it can be recorded 😀
After all, to show a video on your monitor, it needs to digitize each frame and copy it to the framebuffer to get it on screen. And once a frame is digitized in memory, it can obviously be compressed and stored on disk instead of just copying it to the framebuffer.
Perhaps you need third-party software to record it though, such as WinDVR (capture-hardware drivers usually work via the ActiveMovie/DirectShow API, so you can use a wide variety of standardized software with them).

I think the video is displayed directly on the GFX-card over something like feature connector.
It did not use the PCI-bus.

I never found a software to record video, and software like windvr/virtualdub did not recognize the card.

Sammy wrote:

I think the video is displayed directly on the GFX-card over something like feature connector.
It did not use the PCI-bus.

Even so you can grab it from video memory once it's displayed 😀
But if it doesn't use standardized drivers, then your options are limited.
In theory it should be possible anyway. Perhaps with a bruteforce solution like Fraps.

Sadly I can no longer watch TV on this card as Serbia is fully digital signal 😁
I would need an decoder for that.

I wonder where to imploy this card, would be cool to use it as an passtrough for C64 or older consoles if possible.
What are some good frame grabber cards that support VGA and SVideo? (PCI models)

Stojke wrote:

What are some good frame grabber cards that support VGA and SVideo? (PCI models)

Grabbing VGA is difficult and generally expensive.
For S-Video there are various options, from eg Terratec or Hauppauge. There's also various USB options there (USB 2.0 recommended for better resolution/framerate, but USB 1.1 works as well).
There are devices to convert VGA signals to S-Video or composite though, which you can then grab with a regular TV-card/frame grabber. Many older video cards already have these integrated, and have an S-Video out.

Thats why I ask for PCI models as I have seen a lot of such, older, hardware for cheap.

#OP...
I can only think of one thing to use these cards for. That is to hook up an old console, to play old games. Only if the card has composit in that is. I do keep one in my stash, yet that is because it is an ISA card and not PCI.

brostenen wrote:

#OP...
I can only think of one thing to use these cards for. That is to hook up an old console, to play old games. Only if the card has composit in that is. I do keep one in my stash, yet that is because it is an ISA card and not PCI.

very interesting idea brostenen. I've had many hear that nes and console of its kind where not compatible with lcd, if this is true and maybe you can convert signal from coax analog to digital display port. The tie would be about drivers, those old cards seem to have been abandoned with the xp era.

ElBrunzy wrote:

very interesting idea brostenen. I've had many hear that nes and console of its kind where not compatible with lcd, if this is true and maybe you can convert signal from coax analog to digital display port. The tie would be about drivers, those old cards seem to have been abandoned with the xp era.

Well, I think 'not compatible with lcd' is a bit too over-generalized. The issue is that many early computers/consoles cut various corners in the design of their video output circuitry to keep the complexity and cost down. As a result, the output signal was close to PAL/NTSC/SECAM, but not quite 100%.
CRT-based TVs from that era were generally quite forgiving. The signal implicitly synchronizes the beam, and there's quite a bit of tolerance in the system. There's no problem running at a framerate of a few percent higher or lower, or the width of the scanlines being a few percent bigger or smaller. Likewise, the extra pulses ('front porch'/'back porch'/colorburst stuff) simply drive some analog circuit, and it generally 'just works', even if some of these pulses are timed a bit wrong, or are missing altogether.

LCD however is a digital system, so basically they run the analog signal through a framegrabber first, and then display the digitized image on the LCD screen. The digitizer actually expects certain pulses within certain windows of time, and at certain amplitudes, to be able to sync to the image and digitize the pixels. Some framegrabbers are more tolerant than others, but generally not as tolerant as a CRT. So some LCDs work better than others.
One trick you can use is to run the signal through a VCR from that era. While these VCRs are still fully analog, many of them will 'clean up' the signal, because they extract the scanline information from the incoming signal, and reconstruct a new output signal, using their own synchronization and colorburst pulses. These pulses tend to be more 'correct' than what comes from the video output of the machine, so there's a bigger chance that a framegrabber/LCD screen will be able to digitize the signal properly.

So TL;DR: you may 'get lucky' with some framegrabber cards, that can handle old computers/consoles properly, but it's as much of a gamble as LCD TVs are. There's certainly no guarantee that they will work.
I have a rather high-end Blackmagic Intensity framegrabber, and it's great with HDMI and proper PAL/NTSC stuff, but it's completely useless for CGA composite for example. A low-end Terratec Grabby USB works much better.
My Samsung LCD TV also works fine with CGA composite by the way. It can't handle a ZX81 though (missing 'back porch'), but I have a VCR to fix that 😀

Stojke wrote:

Interesting, can an old computer, for example an pentium 133MHz, really record such video with out problems? 😀

brostenen wrote:

#OP...
I can only think of one thing to use these cards for. That is to hook up an old console, to play old games. Only if the card has composit in that is. I do keep one in my stash, yet that is because it is an ISA card and not PCI.

I already did something like that! Must have been between 2000 and 2004, I think..
PC was a Pentium 75 and had a WinTV card installed (no combo card)..
And I used Win 3.1 for that purpose. Even connected our family's old b/w camera via rf cable to it.
Was really fun! At some point I even recorded snap shots of the moon with that camera.. 😁

Awesome, I guess Ill try messing around a little with it 😁

Scali wrote:

... So TL;DR: you may 'get lucky' with some framegrabber cards, that can handle old computers/consoles properly, but it's as muc […]
Show full quote

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So TL;DR: you may 'get lucky' with some framegrabber cards, that can handle old computers/consoles properly, but it's as much of a gamble as LCD TVs are. There's certainly no guarantee that they will work.
I have a rather high-end Blackmagic Intensity framegrabber, and it's great with HDMI and proper PAL/NTSC stuff, but it's completely useless for CGA composite for example. A low-end Terratec Grabby USB works much better.
My Samsung LCD TV also works fine with CGA composite by the way. It can't handle a ZX81 though (missing 'back porch'), but I have a VCR to fix that 😀

Thanks alot for taking time to write that. Since I heard about "entry/exit porch" I was wondering what they where for.

Talking about framegrabber and forgiveness of inexact timing. Do you think it was for that reason than in some video game, sprites where blinking on the screen ? I dont think old sega master or nintendo system where really double buffered capable and some games would had blinking sprites on the ntsc version, for instance, but not on the pal or the whatever version there is in japan because of vsync inaccuracy ?

I just quoted the "tldr" part, but be sure I did read attentively your whole post.

Stojke wrote:

Awesome, I guess Ill try messing around a little with it 😁

Do you know if your card can compress it's recording in any way with hardware? I think most tv tuner have mpeg2 chip for analog input compression. I had an rainbow runner-g series that did awful mjpeg hardware compression, I hate hardware compression since then 😠