What would provide me better quality? (TV on my PC)

[freakguy]

Right now, I have a WinTV Go PCI Card, with my cable line coming into it.

I use BeyondTV to capure everything, and I have it set to MPEG-2 on the Best quality (looking at 1.6gb-ish per 30 min), and the quality if very good. If I lower the recording quality, it gets choppy.

I use the S-Video out on my Radeon 9700 Pro to put it on my TV when i want to watch it on the TV.

Now... I dont want to record that high of quality if I can help it. I want to lower the quality to at LEAST a gig per 30 min.. perferably lower.

What would help me accomplish that?

A) Getting the WinTV-PVR-250 with onboard encoding... or;

B) Getting a better TV-out for display on my TV

I don't know if using my CPU to record is going to affect the recording quality or not.

Thanks

[fester]

bt878 sw encodes are fine for a medium quality mpegs (no matter what you set BTV record quality) if you dont mind the high CPU util. A HW encoder like pvr250 /250BTV or aver m150 will improve recording quality and provide very low CPU util so you can pretty much do anything you want while it records.

Video card w/ good S-Vid --> TV quality should include hw decode chip like *any* ATi AIW card or some people like the newer nVidia cards, etc... I still use AIW8500 (or non-AIW 8500 works great too) since they both have the chip. Just my experience. Today all non-AIW lack the rage theater decode chips to my knowledge so a good budget solution for many is the nVid 5200 or something like it.