Eazyshare

[Razor04]

Spotted this over at FutureMark...looks really nice for those of you that have AIW cards. Now if only they made a version of the AIW that supported/tuned HDTV...

http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2003/4705.html

MARKHAM, Ontario – EAZYSHARE™ software from ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX: ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT) enables users to share TV – live or recorded – from a PC equipped with ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER® card with any other PC on their home network, as long as it has a “Built By ATI” RADEON™ graphics card. The ALL-IN-WONDER card turns a PC into a fully-functional personal video recorder and EAZYSHARE extends those benefits to other PCs in the home. The launch of EAZYSHARE is the latest step in the transition of the PC from workhorse to the multimedia center of a wired home.

ATI’s EAZYSHARE converts a PC with an ALL-IN-WONDER card into a video server. The viewer can sit at any networked PC (assuming it has a “Built By ATI” RADEON card) and watch TV with access to all the functions of a Personal Video Recorder. They can pause live TV, skip ad breaks, get instant replays of touchdowns and so on.

“As home data networks have surpassed the critical ten million household mark for U.S. households and will reach 30 million in just five years, connectivity for multimedia applications will spur dramatic growth,” said Kurt Scherf, Vice President of Research for Parks Associates, a market research and consulting firm. “Given that one in five consumers in networked homes is already expressing an interest in multimedia networks, we anticipate strong uptake for solutions that leverage the processing and storage power of the home computer to drive new entertainment applications.”

“ EAZYSHARE brings us one step closer to putting a multimedia PC at the center of a connected home,” said Ben Bar-Haim, Vice President Software, ATI Technologies Inc. “Now that home networks are commonplace, ATI is introducing EAZYSHARE to leverage them to bring PVR functionality to every room with a computer.”

ATI is the only company to provide a complete multimedia solution for the PC platform: advanced 3D graphics hardware and software; hardware accelerated video processing; and, sophisticated software for remote multimedia enjoyment. ATI’s EAZYSHARE software has been certified by Microsoft Windows Hardware Qualified Labs, confirming its stability and compatibility with the widest possible range of systems.

The combination of ATI’s RADEON based video cards and ALL-IN-WONDER with EAZYSHARE (available in MULTIMEDIA CENTER 8.8/CATALYST 3.10) delivers an enhanced home networking solution – only available from ATI Technologies. EAZYSHARE is designed to run on any secure home networking configuration including 10/100 BaseT, HPNA, and 802.11b/g.

Available for free* download from ATI.com in December 2003, EAZYSHARE is included with ATI’s CATALYST™ 3.10 software package designed to give ATI’s RADEON video card users improved performance, additional entertainment value and overall increased stability.

[digitalwanderer]

WHOOOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!! :D

Now I'll be able to share the digi-cable 'tween Blue & Bubbles, or at least I'll be able to watch what my wife is watching without watching it over her shoulder. :)

[saturnotaku]

<Swami mode>

I predict the television companies and the MPAA will have a conniption over this.

</Swami mode>

I personally think this is a great advancement, but I'm not sure the TV and movie folks will react quite so kindly. I'm probably wrong, but I wanted to put my Swami hat on anyway. :D

[digitalwanderer]

Hmmm...I never thought of that. I was just thinking about sharing it over my local network, I wonder with broadband if I'll be able to share with friends..... :D

(BTW-You're right, they're gonna have conniptions! DOUBLE "WOOO-HOO!!!" :lol: )

[TheOneKEA]

I wonder what route they took:

- Good to excellent quality with a subsequent bandwidth usage, requiring Ethernet or 802.11a/802.11g
- Fair to good quality with much less bandwidth hit, allowing use of 802.11b

Either way this sounds pretty useful to the PVR crowd, especially the folks making PVRs out of Shuttle boxen.

[ChrisW]

This is great news. I am going to set up another computer with my old AIW Radeon 7200 and use it as a TIVO type machine. Now I'll be able to stream the video straight to this computer (I hope)! Let's just hope there will not be a conflict between the AIW 7200 and the AIW 9700. :eek: I hope the file player can also be streamed through the network so I can watch saved video.

[cthellis]

Well THEY might have conniptions, but WE certainly ain't! :D Pretty nifty stuff.

[sxotty]

Sounds like a nice little program, will one be able to use it with a tvwonder card instead? I plan on buying one of these things sometime after the remote wonder II gets bundled with them.

[TheOneKEA]

What about standalone PCI tuners like the ones from Hauppage? If those tuners can be supported as well (they do MPEG encoding/decoding ON THE BOARD <- teh win), then this software will definitely be useful for anybody interested in PVR.

[Razor04]

I don't think it will be a huge problem. You are just rebroadcasting within your home. Granted there is the possibility of sending outside...but who has enough bandwidth to do it effecitively? Not many people... Also a program called SnapStream has been doing this for years...just now you get a free solution. It is stuff like this that I really like to see out of ATI.

[Razor04]

I doubt you would be able to use it with anything other than an ATI card. Doesn't make sense for them to release a piece of software for free that anyone can use. Go look up the program I just mentioned in my previous post if you want a solution for other cards.

[ChrisW]

My guess is this will be a feature for AIW cards only. I doubt they will support the TV Wonder cards and I know they will not support cards from other manufacturers. This is basically a way to try to get people with networks to purchase an AIW based card for at least one of their computers.

[Gator]

Originally posted by ChrisW
My guess is this will be a feature for AIW cards only. I doubt they will support the TV Wonder cards and I know they will not support cards from other manufacturers. This is basically a way to try to get people with networks to purchase an AIW based card for at least one of their computers.

according to ATI only the server for Eazyshare needs an AIW card, but all the clients only need a Radeon card, so even a Radeon7000/VE should work.

I think it's a nifty idea by ATI, it may impress people enough to increase Radeon sales, even if it's only the cheapo Radeons :eek:

[bloodbob]

As soon as the new digital TV standard comes out and you buy a new digital TV tuner card you won't be able to do this as it will be required by law only to display to the screen. ( If you have a digital TV you probably gonna have to buy a new one)

Thankfully I live in australia and we aren't gonna have any stinking copywrite flag on our broadcast because we are basicly using industry standards for everything here like straight MPEG-2 for the video stream.

[Razor04]

That whole thing is completely overemphasized. First of all the "new digital tv standard" has been in place for years. Yes a new tuner would be required in order to tune HDTV but think about this... Remember the Radeon 8500 AIW? with its silicon tuner? It was fully capable of tuning and outputting the OTA (over the air) HDTV feeds and also cable feeds. Problem was the chips needed to do stuff with that feed (i.e. decode/descramble) at the time were prohibitively expensive. ATI now makes a single chip solution that can do everything that is needed (and it has been selected for use in a major manufacturers TVs too)...so it is possible.

With regards to the whole broadcast flag...this is so overstated by people it isn't even funny. You won't have to buy a new TV as all current sets will just ignore the flag and there isn't a single thing that they can do about it. Also the broadcast flag is only meant to prevent mass redistribution and isn't supposed to infringe on any consumer fair use rights. So transmitting to another device to watch shouldn't be a problem so long as a copy isn't made. There is a lot more that could be written on this but I don't want to bore everyone. Oh and I wouldn't be so ****y with regards to the whole "we won't have a flag cause we use standards thing"...the flag is part of the standard and will inevitably at some point make its way into your stuff too.

If you really want to get into all this check out avsforum.com they have a chicken little thread or two regarding this.

[Cary]

Originally posted by TheOneKEA
I wonder what route they took:

- Good to excellent quality with a subsequent bandwidth usage, requiring Ethernet or 802.11a/802.11g
- Fair to good quality with much less bandwidth hit, allowing use of 802.11b

Either way this sounds pretty useful to the PVR crowd, especially the folks making PVRs out of Shuttle boxen.

The standards you are quoting are all wireless standards. Wired LANs should be just fine. As you mentioned though, wireless clients will likely have to play with settings to get the right balance of quality/bandwidth.

The silly part is how you have to be watching the same channel. The usefulness of this feature seems rather limited to me, especially since you can already stream video using Windows Media Encoder.

[TheOneKEA]

Well, if you forgo the use of a Shuttle for a discreet PVR, you can just get ahold of a good PCI TV tuner -- that way you can use Eazyshare to stream the TV from the AIW Radeon 9XXX Pro somewhere and watch your own channel off the PCI unit.

[sabrewulf165]

I thought this sounded cool at first, but now that I'm reading all the limitations of it, it seems fairly worthless. Also, has anyone figured out any kind of hack to allow non-Radeon cards to be clients?

[saturnotaku]

Since no one has posted in this thread since November, I would have to say the answer to your question is no because no one here has bothered to care. </shrug>

[sabrewulf165]

I checked out the thread on rage3d and no one seems to have figured it out either... sounds to me like ATI's software is just broken