Planning PVR350 purchase, but hesitant.

[FoaMDarT]

I want to use SS3, even bought the software before my hardware (at the "special" price). We'll see if it actually goes to $99 tomorrow.

I'm planning on having the machine I'm building be a stand alone HTPC housing PVR capabilities and mp3's. It will be in my living room hooked up to my home theater with the mp3 and MPEG2 directories shared on the network. The idea is to allow anyone connected to the LAN to be able to play or download files without overloading the machine.

So, my thought was to purchase a Hauppauge PVR350 to take advantage of the hardware encoding and decoding. After diving into these forums a little more, I'm seeing that SS3 does not yet take advantage of the full capabilities of this card (to be fair, I did notice the card as "*Support planned for future release").

What I'm not clear on is if SS will take advantage of the hardware encoding/decoding? I also see that there is a work around to get the card working in the meantime. I just want to know what to expect after the meantime. Is the PVR350 my best bet in allowing my machine to handle heavy loads? Or should I look elsewhere?

Thanks,
-Jeremy

[jkoon]

When SnapStream releases the point release, they will fully support the 250 (and 350 as far as I know). SnapStream will use the hardware encoding features, promises to be very nice.

Some people have already been having 'some' success using SnapStream and particular drivers, so in that sense SnapStream already allows use of the hardware encoding features of these cards.

[FoaMDarT]

jkoon,

Thanks for the reply. I guess my real concern is, will SnapStream take advantage of the hardware decoding of the 350?

As this is the difference between the 250 and 350, knowing will help me in my buying decision.

My thinking is that hardware decoding will allow for more optimized Live TV playback when using time shifting, as well as take a lot of the load off of the CPU.

Am I on the right track here? Or will hardware decoding not be used by SnapStream?

Thanks again!
-Jeremy

[jkoon]

I don’t know this for sure, but my guess is that SnapStream will not be able to take advantage of the hardware decoding. Now the hardware encoding yes, so that will be a big help in recording but as for playing the files back I have not heard any talk of adding support for their hardware decoding.

I don’t think using the 350’s hardware decoding is possible because of the way SnapStream is designed to play back videos (as they put their own overlays and such on top of the actual mpeg video). Of course I am no expert when it comes to this, but I like to pretend that I know what I am talking about at least some of the time.

Hope that helps.

[PBMax]

The hardware encoding features of the card should work without a hitch. jkoon is correct about the hardware decoding. You actually have to hook up your TV to the PVR350 card in order to use the hardware decoding feature. Which means that you only see the MPEG-2 output on the card. Our current implementation of PVS means that we can't use the hardware decode of the PVR350 since we don't use overlays at all.