ATI 650 Multiple Questions here...

[bpost34]

Hey guys, I'm sorry I'm a total newb... of course this is my first post. Let me give you some background:

Current HTPC:
Abit KT7a-Raid
AMD Athlon 1.4ghz
768megs PC133
40gig WD (WinXP Partition)
160gig WD SE (Capture Storage)
ATI Radeon 8500 128meg
ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI (used to be ATI TV Wonder PCI, bought the 650 tonight after being tired of the garbage picture and software encoding)

I began my HTPC project just a few weeks ago, after scraping together some spare parts and deciding to make my own DVR. At first, this was inspired by a linux program called MythTV. I'm sure there are a few of you here who have heard of it, and those who haven't, I'll spare you the details. Long story short, I fail at Linux! I'm much more comfortable in a Windows environment, that and I couldn't quite get my ATI 8500 s-video output to work with Linux. Back to Windows I went, and was fed up using ATI's TV (Eazylook) program.

So anyway here I am after buying BTV4.5, which is clearly much more robust than anything I've run into so far... but here's where I'm confused: Bit Rates, and Preferred MPEG-2 Decoder.

First off on the Bit Rates, given my setup, can anyone approximate what kind of bitrate I should be using for smooth (and at least SDTV comparable) playback? At the moment after reading another thread, I'm using a Variable Bitrate of 4000 base and 7000 peak

Preferred MPEG-2 Decoder: Currently my options include Cyberlink Video/SP Decoder, InterVideo Video Decoder, Snapstream Video/SP Decoder. Shouldn't I be seeing something from ATI here, or does my 650 automatically do the MPEG-2 Encoding, and this playback setting is for it to be displayed on my monitor? Sorry, once again, total noob. Also, I notice green boxes popping up all over the place while using the Snapstream option, while the Cyberlink option seems to be clear... should i just chalk it up to "if it ain't broke don't fix it" or am I missing something? Is there any benefit to using the Snapstream option instead?

Thank you for your patience and your responses, I know that was kind of a useless wall of text, but from my trolling here the past few days for answers, a lot of you guys seem pretty nice and helpful.