New VS Old Hauppage cards

[Brad Isaac]

Hi all,

I've been out of the loop for a long time. I just installed the BTV 3 trial and taking it for a spin. I was wondering how much of an improvement the newer Hauppage cards are compared to the older WinTV tuner cards? I've got the one that uses the 878/9 drivers - it's labelled NTSC 44801 Rev C126. Actually I am considering the bundle that they have for sale that includes the PVS-250 card. Would I see a great improvement in video quality while using the Snapstream Live tv option?

currently running P4 1.8 + 512MB Ram 40Gig HD.

Thanks,
Brad

[genesis]

The PVR250/350 have hardware MPEG2 encoding, compared to the software encoding on BT878/9. Because of this, you'll see substantial image quality improvements, and better responsiveness of the system during livetv. Your P4 1.8 is going to be quite taxed with a software encoder, but will probably only have about 20% CPU usuage with a PVR250.

The one small downside to hardware encoding is you can't stream live tv in wmv over a network. It works perfectly for livetv, but because BTV can't get access to an uncompressed stream from the PVR250, it can't encode to WMV on the fly. 3.5 will allow dual tuners however, so hopefully you will be able to use both your old software tuner in addition to the 250, and get the best of both worlds.

[carthur50]

I just went from a WinTV PCI (BT878, I think) to a PVR 250. The difference is amazing. I am able to watch and record at the highest quality setting without any issues. I had to drop the quality level down to "better" when using the old card. I would have frequent stuttering, etc which is non-existant with the PVR 250.

I would recommend getting a 250, if you can.

[Brad Isaac]

Thanks for your replies...so do you record programs in the background on your PC while you are working on other stuff? That would be ideal for me.

[carthur50]

Originally Posted by Brad Isaac

Thanks for your replies...so do you record programs in the background on your PC while you are working on other stuff? That would be ideal for me.

Work on other stuff, switch users (XP Fast user switching enabled) with no problems whatsoever.

I'm running on a P4 2.0, 512 meg RAM, 100 gig HD. You MAY want to get a bigger drive.

[Brad Isaac]

Originally Posted by carthur50

I'm running on a P4 2.0, 512 meg RAM, 100 gig HD. You MAY want to get a bigger drive.

MAY? MAY? how about absolutely?