Choosing a Tuner Card & DirecTV

[SteinyD]

I am in the process of choosing equipment to enable the recording of programming from DirecTV service. My first decision that I'm struggling with is which tuner card to purchase. It seems from reading this forum that the Hauppauge 250/350 cards are the most popular. I found at the local store the ATI TV Wonder Pro.

Is one of these cards (Hauppauge 250, Hauppauge 350 or ATI TV Wonder Pro) better then the others? If so, why? Is there any compatible benefit to using the ATI in a box that also as an ATI Radeon 9600XT card installed?

My second decision is how to communicate with the DirecTV STB. My first inclination is to hardwire it between my PCs DB9 serial port and the DirecTV RCA STB's 'low speed data' port (RJ11) using the wiring scheme at www.pcmx.net/dtvcon. If I use this, is it supported by BeyondTV? I would think it is since Snapstream sells a premade version of this cable.

Thanks in advance for your input!

David

[grillcheese]

Theres bound to be a ton of posts regarding the ATI VS PVR250/350, you would want to search for those and maybe even check out the posts at myhtpc.net - to save you some tho...bite the bullet and get an pvr250.

The AIW is a software encoding card, I was using mine for tv in / out but I wasnt happy with the way snapstream looked on my ATI - watching sports was awful. After locating a cheap pvr250 on ebay (oem/mce for $89), I havent looked back. I now have split the coax going to aiw and to the pvr250, so I capture my video with the 250 and I can stream live tv using the aiw over my lan. The pvr250 doesnt have an output, so you need a video card anyway, an aiw will provide you with a nice remote and works well with snapstream as well as with windows and other apps. (WMP9..etc.)

Hope this helps.