Newbie help, please!

[mtcabral]

Hi, Everybody,

I'm a newbie to the whole DVR/video world, but reasonably saavy around PCs. My goal is to get Tivo/Replay-alike capability out of my PC. Here are my questions. Any help (and/or a pointers to previous threads that may cover me) much appreciated. Thanks!

1) From looking things over, it looks like a need to add a TV tuner card and the BeyondTV3 software to my standard PC config. Anything I'm missing? For point of ref, my PC is 2.6 ghz Dell with 256 RAM.

2) It looks like the PVR250 is generally the tuner card of choice. Agreed? If so, what are the downsides of the cheaper ones that are listed on the Snapstream site? Lower quality pic?

3) Does my on-board video card matter at all if I intend to send everything to my TV for viewing?

4) From what I've read, it looks like the PVR250 does not have a video out. If so, how are folks getting recorded stiff out to their TVs? I have a PRISMIQ that I can use, but I'm curious how others are doing it?

Thanks much!
Mike

[archie]

Welcome! hope you will start using btv and start enjoying watching tv again!

1) generally, yes, that is all you need. it sounds like your system will meet the system requirements, but check all the details to be sure. once you are happy with it, you will probably want a larger hard drive (regardless of the one you have now!)

2) yes, the pvr 250 is the way to go. basically, the software encoding cards require the cpu to encode the video. the sound card is used to encode the sound. some users were having issues with audio/video synch. but, yeah, the quality will be lower. look here for others that will agree with me that hdwr encoding is the way to go. also look at the poll results to get an idea.

3) do a search for on board video. i used to see many people with problems using that, but haven't seen many recently. i don't have it, so i can't tell you anything else about it. most seem to recommend the nvidia 5200 if you are going to get a new card.

4) a few are using the prismiq, but i hear that there are many problems with the unit itself, not its use with btv. if it is working well for you, it should continue to do so with btv. as for what others are doing, many are using the MediaMVP. i use a modulator to send the btv signal throughout my house.

hope that helps. let us know what other questions you have. i love btv and rarely watch tv other than through it.

archie

[MonsterHTPC]

I have done many tests with on board video and always find it to be a shot in the dark and too unpredictable for my tastes. you already have the hardware so go ahead and try it out nothing to loose by trying it. If it doesn't perform to par then get a seperate vid card like the Radeon 9200 class or equivalent.

Go with the PVR250 you will be very satisfied, watch local dealers like compusa if you aren't in a big hurry, every time they get a shipment in here and are overstocked they sell them for $100.

[mtcabral]

Great info, archie/monster, thanks. A follow up or two:

1) Do the "time shifting" features work no matter what is pushing the video to the TV (Prismiq, MediaMap, etc)? One of the big things I want to accomplish is the ability to pause live TV when the baby starts crying.

2) I noticed that the SnapStream site packages BTV3, the PVR250 and a remote for $179. Is that worth it? What does the remote get me?

3) The statement below scares me. What do I lose because of this? Are they making ref to live TV, per my #1 above (I hope not), or are they talking about streaming stuff off the Internet?

*Please Note: Beyond TV's live TV streaming feature is not compatible with TV tuner cards that employ on-board hardware encoding. You can, however, stream recordings compressed to Window Media Format using ShowSqueeze.

Thanks again!
Mike

[Terminal]

Originally posted by mtcabral
Great info, archie/monster, thanks. A follow up or two:

1) Do the "time shifting" features work no matter what is pushing the video to the TV (Prismiq, MediaMap, etc)? One of the big things I want to accomplish is the ability to pause live TV when the baby starts crying.

As long as your recording in MPEG format you have the timeshifting capability.

2) I noticed that the SnapStream site packages BTV3, the PVR250 and a remote for $179. Is that worth it? What does the remote get me?

Its gets you no keyboard or mouse. You can use the remote to navigate the FSUI menus.

3) The statement below scares me. What do I lose because of this? Are they making ref to live TV, per my #1 above (I hope not), or are they talking about streaming stuff off the Internet?

*Please Note: Beyond TV's live TV streaming feature is not compatible with TV tuner cards that employ on-board hardware encoding. You can, however, stream recordings compressed to Window Media Format using ShowSqueeze.


Thanks again!
Mike

They are talking about streaming live TV. Only streaming across a WAN or LAN though, not watching it on your local server. If you want to stream Live TV then you can't use a PVR250. A new client version will be out soon, remember soon is relative, that may allow this. Of coarse that would only work on a wired network. The bitrate for MPEG would be to high for most wireless networks. Also dual tuner support is not to far off, so you could have both a PVR250 and a software encoder and have the best of both worlds. For the current version Live TV can only be streamed across your WAN or LAN if you have a software encoder.

[MonsterHTPC]

Ok let me take a shot at this, see if i can clear it up for you.

1) If you can use snapstream timeshifting should work. Basically Live tv is a recording that you watch 2 seconds ish behind real time. Best bet is to download the trial version of BTV and see how well it works with your current setup.

2) Barring any deals that are going on yes this is a very good deal. normally a PVR 250 with packaged remote is 150 + and snapstream is 60, so that would total 210 very roughly of course so $180 is nice.

3) This comment applies to streaming video over the net. IE if you were at work and wanted to log into your PVR via its web page and watch TV on your computer at work streamed to you via your HTPC you can't with a hardware encoder. Software encoders like the all in wonder series will do this; however, the hardware encoders save cpu processing and provide a much better quality record in most cases.

[mbmonk]

Just wanted to mention you can buy a GeForce 4 MX 420 for around $35 and you can get it in either PCI or AGP. It has SVideo out and nvidias drivers are better than ATI's in my opinion. This is a great cheap card and if you get it in PCI you can put it in any machine.

Welcome to the board hope everything works for you.

[MonsterHTPC]

I have always been an advocate of nvidia and love their products, but mainly in a PC for an HTPC I experience less problems and better performance with ATI. BOTH are very good and offer great performance.

Alot of the HTPC style software out there is specifically written with ATI in mind and better performance with them, some examples are DivX player and powerstrip.

I experience issues with Nvidia cards and TT on occasion that recquire some tweaking and possibly driver rollbacks.

Dual monitor support has always been easier for me with ATI.

When going into Nvidia driver setup/properties the monitor flickering and resync is very annoying and when doing extensive testing with different resolutions and configuring this is rough, plus their menu system is a bit annoying in its current format. Looks impressive but I like functionality.

take it for what its worth not bashing nvidia, on the contrary for games i always buy nvidia, but for HTPC applications and software I have always found ATI to support that corner of the market better.

[mtcabral]

Thanks for the advice, everybody. What a great board!

I guess the only remaining question for me at this point is to figure out how to get my live tv and/or recorded stuff back to my TV. I have a Prismiq (not as bad as you may have heard) for the recorded stuff, so that should be fine. but I'm not sure how my Prismiq would fit into a live mix. How do BTV and MediaMVP do their thing to get live (ie, very slightly pre-recorded) stuff out to the TV?

Thanks!
Mike

[MonsterHTPC]

not sure I quite understand, but if you are just talking about watching live TV on BTV or others, its a recording, and even if it wasn't the process would be the same as getting the desktop image to your set. If you can see the desktop on your set then you should be able to view BTV and therefore any show within BTV and LiveTV within BTV.

The exact method depends solely on your graphics card, whether your graphics card has VGA, DVI and/or S-Video out then tha is what you would use any of those, of course you want to have the same input on your display and always use the one with the best quality roughly from best to worst.

DVI
Component/VGA (roughly the same)
S-Video
Composite

component can be a pain sometimes and might recquire powerstrip.

[Eric3a]

One of the big things I want to accomplish is the ability to pause live TV when the baby starts crying.

You got that wrong.
You want to pause the baby when the TV is running.

Eric

[mtcabral]

Ah, OK, I gotcha now, thanks. I was originally thinking I'd record stuff to my PC, then use the Prismiq to get it to the TV. But it makes perfect sense that I need the direct connection from the graphics card to the TV for BTV to do its thing. I can still use the Prismiq for pre-recorded stuff, just like any MPEG, but I'll need the S-vid for my BTV interface and PVR functionality. Again, thanks!

And if anybody figures out how to pause an two-week old, say the word!

Thanks!
Mike

[archie]

Congrats on the two week old! i'm not sure that now is a good time to be looking into a dvr... you aren't getting enough sleep as it is to go messing with your computer!!

to clarify one thing that monsterpc says:

3) This comment applies to streaming video over the net.

it also applies to streaming video over your home LAN. to stream a recording across your LAN, the file currently must be wmv. i believe that in a coming release, hopefully not too far in the future, ss will support mpeg streaming. what this means is that currently on your laptop (for instance) you can watch a program that is on your btv desktop.

as for getting it to your tv, there are many ways to do this. look here for some ideas. if you have your tv in a different room from your btv machine, and you are happy with you prismiq, you can easily continue to use it to watch stuff recorded by btv. (i don't have one, but the only limiting issue i can see is will the prismiq server see new files as btv adds them to your hard drive.)

i don't think this is available yet with the prismiq, but others are using the mediamvp ($99) to view livetv.

on another point, i wouldn't worry too much about livetv. others here will disagree, but i never watch livetv. if there is something i want to watch, ss is already recording it. so at that time i just watch something else that has previously been recorded.

archie

[MonsterHTPC]

I do not know the details of your setup, but I watch stuff over my network all the time that is DivX and Mpeg. Mostly divX as everything is recompressed. In fact I watch most of my material in the house across the network. Course I don't watch it while logged into my BTV web page from within the house, since the material is on the network, why would I want to use the BTV web interface when I can just double click a file and watch it

Now if you are talking live TV streamed over your network at home then yes you are right, but in theory using your network in that manner is the same principle as using the internet