Considering Beyond TV

[jasahl]

I'm hoping to build a dual tuner PVR from my old PC.

It is a 833 MHz Pentium III, 384 MB RAM & a 27 MB hard drive, Windows XP SP2, nVidia RIVA TNT2 Model 64/64 Pro graphics card. I plan to add a second hard drive for BTV to record to (According to the people over at byopvr.com it functions better when the recordings are sent to a different drive than the OS is on) and I also would like to use two Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 capture cards.

According to snapstream's product description, my PC meets the minimum requirements (since the 150's have hardware encoding), but I wasn't sure how it would perform with two tuners.

Who out there is using a multi-tuner system & what are the specs on your machine? I guess if it doesn't work well, I'd have to just run with one tuner for a while until I can afford to build a new system from scratch. My PC is a Dimension 4100 that is pretty much upgraded as far as it can go - although I can replace the 128 MB chip w/ a 256 MB chip for a full 512 MB for ~$70.

[DonK]

If this box is expressly doing recording only and not playing back TV/Recordings, it probably would make a great server.

The process of playing back recordings is where the cpu intense operation is.

Your video card definitely won't have the horsepower for it at all, and we already have issues with the video card you have because it doesn't have full hardware DX9 support (or DX8 for that matter), but it does have it in the software.

[NYPlayer]

I see you will be using the PVR 150 card with Beyond TV. Well there is a bug with Beyond TV where the Video will be stretched. This totally ruins the first recording... any other recordings after that will be ok. There is a work around where you enter live TV then exit and re-enter live tv.

Also if you have shows scheduled to record and the Beyond TV service crashes and restarts your first recording after recovery will be ruined. So till they fix this problem I have stopped using Beyond TV.

[brw117]

I just wanted to add that I have a dual 2 PVR-150 card system and the fact of having to enter and exit from each tuner isn't really that bad. I start and record 1 show and then change the channel to something else then exit and stop recording. (Takes like 15-20 seconds and other than that they work absolutely beautifully)

I totally recommend the PVR-150

[rkuo]

The stretching is a known driver bug which can be worked around by recording at the Best DVD ready quality all the time. There is a fix coming very soon from the manufacturer for this particular issue.

[Treetop]

I was wondering why I haven't seen that problem...

[jasahl]

Originally Posted by DonK

If this box is expressly doing recording only and not playing back TV/Recordings, it probably would make a great server.

The process of playing back recordings is where the cpu intense operation is.

Your video card definitely won't have the horsepower for it at all, and we already have issues with the video card you have because it doesn't have full hardware DX9 support (or DX8 for that matter), but it does have it in the software.

Would a card like this one take care of playback issues? I checked the system requirements & it looks like this card will fit w/ my PC & it looks like it has full DirectX 9.0 support. It's a bit pricey, but the cheaper ones required a larger power supply than my box has & this is less than a power supply AND an nVidia graphics card.

[ejdriscoll]

That looks like a good choice to me. I'm using a less powerful Radeon 9200 and it works just great. ($74 after rebate and includes Half-Life 2? Looks like a great deal!)