Should I upgrade my TV Tuner Card?

[ozydedanaan]

I'm running the latest Beyond TV with an old Hauppauge WinTV card. The card was made back in '98 (my chipset doesn't even have "Connexant" stamped on it). Now the card works fine, there's a few pauses when I first tune a channel and then it's smooth.

The TV picture looks a little grainy, but the capture rate looks okay.

The system is an Athlon 64 3000+ with 1 Gig of RAM.

My question is: would upgrading to a Hauppauge 150 or better get me anything over the old card? Would it be less taxing on the processor? Would the video be better?

[jkoon]

The video would probably be a little better but the big improvement is that it is much less taxing on the cpu.

Just be aware that with a hardware card you cant record straight to wmv and you cant stream live tv through the web interface.

But I highly recommend the hardware tuner cards over software.

[not_Shorty]

the video would be insanely better. You're currently using BTV's software encoder, which, to put it mildly, sucks. If you got the PVR 150 you obviously avoid the software encoder, since the card does the encoding itself. You might not believe it right now, but you won't believe the difference once you get one. My advice if you're leary, simply buy it from a store with a liberal return policy. In the highly unlikely event that you don't like the card, return it. Sincerely doubt returning it will even be on your mind from the very first minute you look at its recording quality. Plus it'll use, oh, 5% CPU to record at most, due mostly to disk activity CPU usage.

[QuantumFX]

Yes, the video capture will be better, your processor will have better things to do and it'll be more responsive. I have an AverMedia 1500 that's a world of difference than the All In Wonder I used to have. It only set me back $50 (shipped). If I were you though I'd look at one of the Plextor USB2 recorders with DivX hardware encode. BeyondTV 3.7.2 is supposed to have full support for the DivX recording and that would be awesome for storage space.

[DodgeV83]

When I added a PVR 250 after using only the ATI AIW...the difference was amazing