how do I know if I have a hardware or software decoder?

[Brian.Stephens]

This is what I have, it works great, but I do not know if it is hardware or software.

http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp...nDZPdF&cat=VID

Brian

[ejdriscoll]

I think that mainly it's not the *DE*coder you really care about, it's the mpeg2 *EN*coder - the thing that encodes (compresses) the digitized TV/cable/whatever signal into an mpeg file. Looking at the specs, your video card does not appear to have a harware encoder, so I think you're using software to encode the TV signal to mpeg.

Looking at this pvr identification guide (courtesy htpcnews):http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=pvr_card_id_guide_2

seems to confirm that, if I'm reading it correctly. It says that the CX23880 chip, which is on your card, is a TV digitizer, while the CX23416 (not listed on your video card specs) is the hardware mpeg encoder chip.

And even without looking at the specs, most cards that are called "TV tuners" instead of "PVR's" tend to not have a hardware mpeg2 encoder, so this wouldn't be particularly suprising.

Obviously, if it's working great for you that's the important thing!

[richt]

I am inclined to think tha since it doesn't say it is "hardware encoding" then it probably isn't. A quick check would be to find out the CPU utilization during recording (not watching TV). If it is 1% to 3% total CPU use during recording then it is either magic or a hardware encoder.