Reviewer: Pierre Igot
Date: October 16, 2001
Price: $99US.
Requirements: USB-capable Macintosh computer running Mac OS 8.6 or higher (Mac OS 9 recommended) and QuickTime 4.0 or higher. (Mac OS X currently not supported.)
Company: ATI Technologies Inc.
Contact: 882-2600
Rating: 3 Bounces — Lustworthy

When it comes to TV and video, we have undoubtedly entered the digital age. More and more people are subscribing to digital TV, either via cable or via satellite. Digital camcorders are all the rage, and they currently occupy the price slot range that used to be reserved for high-end analog (Video 8 or Compact VHS) camcorders, which are now twice or three times as cheap as they were a few years ago. There is little doubt that, within a few years, analog camcorders will have become an extinct species and even people with no ambitions in digital movie editing will own and use digital equipment.

Even more importantly for us Mac users, the Mac has been and still is at the vanguard of digital video editing. From the basic, consumer-level iMovie video editing application (which ships free-of-charge with every current Mac model) and the free iDVD software (which ships with DVD-R capable G4 machines) to the free QuickTime Player (and its “professional” counterpart QuickTime Pro) to Apple’s professional line of digital video software, including Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro, the Mac platform is clearly a natural fit for “consumers” who are more or less interested in video recording and editing — and digital video is what it’s all about.

Steve Jobs himself has devoted lots of energy to promoting the Mac as a viable digital video editing tool “for the rest of us” (i.e. not reserved for video professionals), and seems to strongly believe that digital video is the next big thing for consumer-level computing, after desktop publishing in the 1980’s and the Internet in the 1990’s.

Stuck in the Analog Age

In spite of this, there are still millions of people using good old VCRs, with shelves full of VHS tapes amassed over the years. There are still many people who own and use analog camcorders. And people receiving analog TV signals either through a good old antenna or through analog cable still represent a great portion of the TV viewing public.

In addition, with all the hype surrounding digital video on the Mac, many people still use Mac computers that are not really powerful enough to do lots of digital video editing on the fly (which requires gobs of hard drive space and a fairly powerful processor, not to mention a decent amount of RAM). Among these people, some might be considering the purchase of a new computer and a new digital camcorder — but it’s a safe bet to say that, for many of them, this still represents a fairly sizeable investment. (We are talking about several thousands of dollars here.)

As well, many of us know all too well that a significant number of camcorders end up spending most of their time sitting on a shelf because, well, we know that there’s only so many hours of tapes of our kids wading in the inflatable swimming pool in the backyard that their grand-parents, uncles and aunts can take. While it is possible that switching to digital might lead some of us to become more creative and discover their unsuspected video editing talents, it is also quite probable that, just like their analog counteparts, a number of those expensive digital camcorders end up sitting on a shelf and suffering from a bad case of underuse.

Bringing the “Video-In” Plug Back to Your Mac

For many years, Apple and other third-party companies such as ATI used to provide users with the opportunity to equip their Macs with analog “video-in” capabilities. Apple used to sell “AV” models such as the PowerMac 7100 AV, which came with two video cards, one of which had video-in capabilities. And ATI used to sell various types of video cards with video-in capabilities, such as the Xclaim VR 3D and, more recently, the Xclaim VR 128 (based on the Rage 128 technology).

In the late 90’s, however, Apple opted to leave the video-in market to third-party companies, and to focus on the transition to “everything digital,” with its FireWire technology. Meanwhile, with its “Radeon” generation of video cards, ATI chose to no longer offer cards with video-in capabilities. This left a bit of a hole in the Mac market, which was filled, for those with USB-equipped Macs, by other companies offering USB devices designed for digitizing video or viewing an analog TV signal on your computer screen, such as Eskape Labs, with its My TV USB products, or Formac, with its ProTV Stereo PCI card.

Now, with the Xclaim TV USB Edition device, ATI is re-entering this market. Indeed, the Xclaim TV USB device essentially provides the “audio-in” and “video-in” capabilities that are no longer available standard on Mac computers and on ATI’s video cards.

The package consists of a translucent red box, which ATI calls a “pod” and which has a USB connector and all the necessary ports, as well as two adapters (S-Video-to-Composite for video and RCA-to-mini-jack for audio), a CD-ROM, and a 4-page brochure.

Easy Set-Up

As with most USB devices, setting up the Xclaim TV USB is rather easy. Connect the “pod” to one of your computer’s USB ports (there’s no power supply, as the device draws its power from the USB port), dismiss the standard Mac OS dialog box that tells you that your system doesn’t have the proper drivers for this device, insert the Xclaim TV CD-ROM provided by ATI, and complete the software installation.

As is to be expected under the “classic” Mac OS (at the time of writing, ATI has yet to announce Xclaim TV software for Mac OS X), the installation requires that you restart your computer. Depending on what system components are already installed on your computer, the installer installs up to 20 items inside your “Extensions” folder, including:

ATI Mac2TV™ Monitor
ATI Video Accelerator
ATI 3D Accelerator
ATI Extension
ATI Graphics Accelerator
ATI Radeon 3D Accelerator
ATI Rage 128 3D Accelerator
ATI Resource Manager
ATI USB Interface Library
ATI USB NT1004 Audio
ATI USB Tuner
ATI USB TV Driver
ATI USB Video Digitizer
ATI Video Digitizer
OpenGLEngine
OpenGLLibrary
OpenGLMemory
OpenGLRenderer
OpenGLRendererATI
OpenGLUtility

Some of them are updates to existing components of your system folder (OpenGL files, Radeon and Rage accelerators, etc.), but the USB files are specifically required for the ATI pod to work.

The installer also installs the “Xclaim Video Player,” which is the interface through which you access the pod’s TV and audio-video capabilities.

The Xclaim TV USB comes with no printed manual to speak of (except for the 4-page brochure), but the CD-ROM includes a more detailed, 52-page manual in PDF format.

The Ports

On one side, the pod has two active ports. First of all, it has a “video-in” port which supports both S-Video (also known as S-VHS) and composite video and can be used either with an S-Video cable coming directly from your S-Video capable camcorder or, through the S-Video-to-Composite-Video adapter (included with the device), to any device with a composite “video out” port (typically a yellow-colored RCA plug), including TVs, VCRs, DVD players, etc. The other port is a mini-jack audio-in port, which can be used directly with a mini-jack cable or, through a RCA-to-mini-jack adapter (again, included with the device).

(It should be noted that the package only includes the pod and adapters, and doesn’t include any cables, which you will need to obtain separately from a consumer electronics retailer.)

Strangely, this side of the pod also includes a port labeled “IR” (as in “Infrared”), which, as the brochure specifies, is “not supported,” meaning that it is not used for anything here. I don’t really know why it is included. Maybe ATI sells an IR-capable version of the pod in other markets.

Finally, the top part of the pod has a coaxial connector to which you can connect your cable-TV or UHF/VHF antenna coaxial cable.

ATI XCLAIM TV (USB Edition) – part 2

A Fancy TV Tuner

Using the Xclaim TV USB is pretty straightforward, and, in typical Mac fashion, provided that you have a bit of existing knowledge in the area of analog audio and video, you can pretty much literally “plug and play,” without bothering to read the PDF manual in its entirety. The Xclaim Video Player, however, includes several more “advanced” features that you might want to explore to use the full potential of the device.

If you want to use the pod to watch TV on your computer screen, then you need to connect your cable-TV/antenna cable to the Cable-TV port. The pod includes an analog TV tuner which can detect up to 125 channels in your analog TV signal. In order to watch TV, you just need to launch the Xclaim Video Player application, and run a few steps that are similar to what you need to do the first time you hook up your TV: select Cable TV or Antenna as the type of signal, and create a channel list, either manually or with the “Auto-Tune” feature.

Once you’ve gone through those steps, clicking on the “TV” button in the main window will tell the Video Player to use the Cable-TV port as the video signal (i.e. through the top connector), and then you are ready to browse channels. The player displays the number of each channel and you can assign a channel name to each number. You can also create a list of “favorite” channels and browse that list of channel numbers instead of the full list.

Additional controls let you mute the sound, change the image size, and view Close Captioning text.

You can also use the “Channel Monitor” window to preview up to four channels of your choice at the same time — effectively “monitoring” those four channels until your program of choice is on. Each of the four channel pictures is updated every few seconds.

You can even use the “Hot Words” feature to specify words or phrases that you want the Video Player to watch for in close-captioning text. When a hot word is detected, the Video Player can be set up to automatically come to the foreground, or start recording the text.

Digitizing For The Masses

Digitizing an analog video signal through the Xclaim TV USB is similarly straightforward. You just need to plug your analog video source to the S-Video port (with or without the adapter) and your analog sound source (usually a two-pronged, red and white RCA cable). Once this is set up, you need to tell the player whether your source is regular VHS or S-Video (S-VHS). The player will then automatically start playing whatever is playing on your video device (VCR, DVD player, etc.) in its window.

In order to digitize the audio/video signal, depending on how much space you have available on your hard drive, you might need to do some preliminary adjustments through the “Video Compression Settings…” and “Audio Compression Settings…” commands in the “Control” menu. You can first, however, try to record a few seconds of your signal with no audio compression and using the default “Component Video” codec (one of the several compressor/decompressor algorithms used by QuickTime for saving/compressing video tracks).

You should also remember that the player will record (digitize) the video signal using the current window size as the size settings for the video track. The “Normal” size is 320 pixels by 240 pixels, but you can adjust this to your preferred options.

Recording options

The promotional literature says that you can “capture stills or motion video in resolutions up to 320×240.” However, I didn’t see anything in the software that prevents you from increasing that size to 640×480 or even 1280×960. Of course, you need to realize that a regular VHS signal doesn’t have such a high resolution (resulting in picture interpolation), and also that, the bigger the window size, the larger the movie is going to be. As well, since the literature doesn’t mention using the device for capturing at resolutions higher than 320×240, you can expect a lower frame rate.

At 320×240, the Xclaim TV USB had no trouble digitizing a regular VCR signal on my PowerMac G4/450 at close to 30 fps (frames per second), which is the standard rate for the NTSC signal used in TV and VCR technology. Actually, I was even able to digitize a signal at 1280×960 pixels with an average frame rate of over 27 fps, which is pretty good. The picture looked fine (but excessively big, since this was a resolution that was higher than the resolution of the source signal and the digitizer had to do some interpolation) and the movie played smoothly. Of course, your maximum FPS rate will vary depending on the speed of the various components of your machine. But it’s interesting to see that the speed of a USB connection is actually good enough to digitize motion video at a pretty high frame rate.

Less than Optimum Audio

On the audio side, however, things are a bit more disappointing. The “Audio Compression Settings…” dialog box, which is actually also where you set the audio sampling settings (which have nothing to do with compression, but which do have an impact on your resulting file size), does let you specify either mono or stereo sound, but the sampling rate cannot be anything other than 16 KHz (CD quality requires 44.1 KHz) and you are limited to 8-bit sampling (CD quality requires 16-bit, but the option is greyed out). The internal audio-in capabilities of my G4 (newer models no longer have audio-in capabilities) does support CD quality sound (44.1 KHz/16-bit) when selected as the sound source in the Xclaim Video Player, but the Xclaim TV USB box itself does not.

This is unfortunate, as it means that you will be unable to digitize the audio track of your video stream in high quality. The audio track of a home-made VHS or Video 8 tape recorded with a camcorder is rarely of very high quality to begin with, which means that it’s not too much of a drawback in that case. In addition, if you want to post your movie on the web, you’ll probably want to reduce the quality of your audio track anyway, so that the movie file is not too big. If you want to digitize motion video with a good quality sound track, however, you are out of luck. You will need to purchase another USB device more specialized for this type of operation (or use your Mac’s internal analog audio-in capabilities, if it’s an older Mac), and attempt to synchronize your audio track and your video track using QuickTime Pro’s movie editing capabilities.

I cannot see why ATI chose to limit the capabilities of the USB pod in this respect. Maybe digitizing both video and audio at a high quality level at the same time is beyond the capabilities of a USB device, but I don’t see why ATI couldn’t leave the option to the user to adjust the audio-in settings himself, depending on what he wants to do with the device. As it is, while you can connect a tape player or other audio devices to the Xclaim TV USB in order to digitize sound, the quality is just not satisfactory. (Interestingly, according to the “Movie Info” in my QuickTime Player, I was able to produce a movie with a 44.1 KHz track — but only 8-bit, unfortunately — with the Xclaim Video Player, but I don’t really know how, as the sampling rate in the “Audio Compression Settings…” still specified “16,000 Hz.”)

This is especially problematic in light of the fact that competing products such as the Formac PCI card do support 44.1 KHz/16-bit audio encoding. (Eskape Labs’ products require a separate port for digitizing audio, i.e either the built-in audio-in port of older Macs or a USB device such as Griffin’s iMic, so in that respect the ATI device is somewhat better.)

Based on QuickTime

For the purposes of capturing (digitizing) video, the various settings offered by the Xclaim Video Player are all based on Apple’s underlying QuickTime technology, which means that you have full access to the many codecs and settings provided in QuickTime.

The combination of settings that will produce the best results will obviously depend on many factors: the codec you selected, your monitor color depth, your hard drive speed, the quality and nature of the original video recording, the frame rate you did or did not specify in the video settings, etc. Obtaining optimum results requires a fair amount of patience and trial-and-error. The PDF manual provided by ATI doesn’t provide that many pointers regarding QuickTime’s various codecs, other than saying that the “Cinepak” codec is the “most popular compressor/decompressor.” The manual does offer, however, a number of additional suggestions beyond codec-related considerations, which are worth reading, even if they only represent a quick introduction on the subject.

Given this strong connection with QuickTime technology, if you choose to purchase an Xclaim TV USB pod, it is worth considering purchasing a QuickTime Pro licence from Apple as well. This will provide you with more flexibility, since QuickTime Pro offers a great number of features for digital video editing. As well, since QuickTime Pro enables you to save a QuickTime movie (as captured by the Xclaim Video Player, for example) as a DV stream (“DV” stands for “Digital Video,” the native recording format used by digital camcorders), you can take a video file captured with the Xclaim TV USB, convert it to DV, and then open it with Apple’s iMovie and edit it as you would a digital video file taken directly from a digital camcorder. Of course, the video quality will be less than optimum, but for those interested in trying out the free iMovie that came with their iMac or iBook without having to buy a digital camcorder, it’s an interesting alternative.

Consumer-Level Quality

The key phrase in this review is that the Xclaim TV USB is definitely a “consumer-level quality” device. As we’ve seen above, ATI doesn’t guarantee good results for motion video in resolutions higher than 320×240 pixels (although I was able to obtain excellent video results at 640×480), and its “audio-in” capabilities are too limited for any kind of hi-fi audio editing.

But if your main purpose is just to fiddle around with your USB Mac computer and your existing, analog video devices — just to see, for example, if you might develop a taste for digital video editing and want to take it to the next level — then the Xclaim TV USB pod might be a good option for you. Similarly, if your main purpose is to maybe post a few, medium quality QuickTime movies on your personal web site, then the Xclaim TV USB’s technical limitations won’t be much of a problem for you, and using it in combination with QuickTime Pro (and possibly iMovie) will give you access to a wide range of options, all at a very reasonable price.

No matter what Steve Jobs says, the days of full-screen motion video with CD quality sound for the masses are still not quite here yet. The main reason for this is that too many people still have an Internet connection that is way too slow to either download large video files or view high quality video streams — and not enough people own digital video devices yet. Yes, you can edit full-screen motion video with CD quality sound on the latest Mac models and share it with family and friends on CD-R or DVD-R, but it will still be years before digital video technology becomes as ubiquitous as analog video devices are at present. In the mean time, the Xclaim TV USB is a decent buy and, used in combination with Apple’s own QuickTime Pro software, it’s a good, reasonably priced alternative to purchasing the digital video gear required to experience Steve Jobs’ vision of your Macintosh computer as a “digital hub.”