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Finally, a digital TV tuner card for Mac. Long a staple of the portable PC crowd, PowerBook users have been forced to use external devices, like EyeTV, hanging off USB cables. Now Formac will intro a PCMCIA card at the end of the month which picks up digital TV, Hardmac, the English edition of MacBidouille reports. The Formac Watch and Go card has an external antenna, and supports DMA (Direct Memory Access), so video is sent straight to RAM, by-passing the processor. It will also support MPEG-2 real-time compression, but a promised firmware upgrade will compress into MPEG-4. In Europe, the card will retail for 209 Euros. Analysis: Hm, wonder how it's done? I seem to recall you need Zoomed Video for this (done in hardware on the PowerBook G3s and PowerBook 3400, but this vanished around the time of the TiBooks. Sorry, iBook users - no luck. My old iRez Capsure does some of this - but it needs to be connected to a VCR or TV to pick up stations. Not convenient. Nor does it compress on the fly (well, you could, but G3s aren't powerful enough for full-frame-rate compression on-the-fly video: instead, it records raw footage. But of course it's been outmoded by FireWire devices.
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