Hardware Upgrade Needed?

[spaceghost]

My current system:
Tyan S1854 M/B 850 PIII 448 meg ram
WD 120G on promise ultra 100 card
PVR-250
Video Card: ati rage 128
Windows XP Professional - all patches applied

This is my old pc dedicated to being a pvr. It is great at recording - cpu utilization around 10% or less in high quality settings. It is poor at viewing live tv (video is jerky - really not acceptable for live viewing - cpy utilization in 90% range) or playing back recordings in Snapstream (windows media player and cyberlink playback captured mpegs ok) . Would an upgrade to a better video card (something in the FX5200 class- I don't want to spend much on an old pc) improve the viewing of live tv? I have tried the registry hacks with little or no noticeable improvement in viewing of live tv. Sage live tv looks ok (still not great - not jerky)- but I prefer the Snapstream user interface over Sage

Thanks for any advice

[koan00]

Have you attempted to use the new 'Overlay' display mode instead of 3D mode in 3.4.4?

Also have you made sure you have selected the intervideo decoder in your playback settings?

[spaceghost]

yes - I think I have tried nearly every combination of options

[sloanja]

I would recommend getting a new hard drive 200-300 range to store the mpegs you create with the PVR250. Assuming you have a cdrom with this, you have plenty room to add up to 2 hard drives, and perhaps replace the cdrom with a dvd multi-layer burner....

ahh, if money was no object...

[koan00]

Originally posted by spaceghost
yes - I think I have tried nearly every combination of options

Please double check. The Overlay option is not available via the webmin interface and was only added in version 3.4.4 - the option was created to specifically address problems of users with low end video cards (such as yours).

So the things you should check:

1) Overlay mode enabled
2) Intervideo codec selected for playback.
3) Try running full screen mode at 640x480

If none of the above work, I'd suggest a 50$ video card FX5200/Radeon 9000/9200 as you mentioned, that should clear it up. Unfortunately the Rage 128 chip was underpowered at inception. Not until the radeon series did ATI begin to make cards that could handle more than simple 2D desktop activity.