Plug it to the TV or not?

[wildbeast]

I have a P3 1ghz w/512 RAM and and an ATI TV Wonder VE and I was wondering if I should use that as my HTPC? Will it run smoothly in MPEG-2 Good quality mode?

I know that it works great on my P4 2.4 but unfortunately, unlike the P3 I can't have that always plugged to my TV.

[honer123]

A 1Ghz box will not be able to do much if your are trying to watch livetv with it, unless you get a PVR 250. For recording only though, you could probably get away with some pretty good quality. With the Release of PVS 3.2 your playback should be okay too. Just don't expect to be able to do LiveTV at any decent resolution without a PVR 250

Honer

[V_D_O]

For HW encoding, use the Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 (expensive). For HW decoding, use the Creative DXR3 (very cheap). There. You should now have no problems at all.

Except that the Creative drivers for the DXR3 in XP are only in the beta stage (since 2001!), and you have to get 3rd party DirectShow filters. Once it works, though, it works great.

[wildbeast]

Originally posted by honer123
A 1Ghz box will not be able to do much if your are trying to watch livetv with it, unless you get a PVR 250. For recording only though, you could probably get away with some pretty good quality. With the Release of PVS 3.2 your playback should be okay too. Just don't expect to be able to do LiveTV at any decent resolution without a PVR 250

Honer

Livetv seems to be going pretty well though on my P4 2.4 and the ATI TV Wonder.

So if I get a PVR 250, Live TV should play smoothly on my P3?

And I won't be connecting it to an HDTV, just on a cheap 27" TV so I guess I must have the resolution set to 640x480?

[V_D_O]

So if I get a PVR 250, Live TV should play smoothly on my P3?

The PVR 250 only encodes in hardware. The decoding is still done in software. However, a 1GHz P3 should still decode fine, especially using a 3rd party codec such as NVDVD's.

And I won't be connecting it to an HDTV, just on a cheap 27" TV so I guess I must have the resolution set to 640x480?

Not 'must' but 'prbably should'.

[honer123]

Hey V_D_O,
Do you have any updates about the DXR3?
I was following the thread with MrPhil talking about the DXR3 and how he got it to work, but he hadn't tested the VGA passthrough.
One question is, does this card with the VGA passthrough allow the PVS FSGUI to be present until LiveTV or Playback, and does it show the channel and volume info during LiveTV for example. I am very interested in this setup. Especially if they PVS guys like DashWRX and crew can find a way to get these MPEG Decoder boards, or at least a few of them to work with the video overlay.

Honer

[wildbeast]

I've got Snapstream running on my P3 at MPEG2 Fair quality. It's running okay but if I can get a better quality with Hauppage then I'm gonna order a Hauppage from Amazon and wait for it to arrive, until then I'll be using my ATI TV Wonder. Can hardly find that card around here.

[honer123]

Yes, you will see a major improvement in the recording. You will able to record DVD 720X480 and only use about 3% of your cpu. If you watch livetv and use a codec like NVDVD, which is free to try, you will use only about 50-70% cpu with DVD quality.
Honer

[wildbeast]

Okay but why not the PVR350 instead of the PVR250 ? Apparently the 350 also have hardware decoder

My video card is an ATI Radeon 7200, is it good enough or will I also need a good Video Out card?

[WillP]

Unfortunately the HW mpeg decoder on the pvr350 is unsupported so you won't be able to use it at this time. And just for your information it doesn't appear that it will be supported in the near future. You can still use it but only for encoding.

As far as your video card, it should work alright as far as I know. You do not need a powerful card. Personally I have never had a chance to observe the TV-out quality of the Radeon 7200. The GeForce4/FX cards seem to get the best reviews as far as quality goes. I'd advise to try your card out with PVS and see how it is.

When version 3.2 is released (very shortly) 3rd party software mpeg2 decoders will be supported. Using a different codec (nvdvd works great for me) should significantly reduce your cpu usage. Between that and the pvr250/350 you should be in great shape.

Will

[V_D_O]

Honer, I'd got halfway through installing the card when I realised that using the passthrough with my dual-mon setup might be a little difficult until I got a proper dualhead video card, so I stopped. When I said it worked, I was referring to mrphil's experience.

[wildbeast]

Okay so where's the best place to buy this thing online? Amazon refuses to ship it to Canada and Haupauge's order form doesn't work either.

[RobertH]

wildbeast:

check out their list of resellers for the americas (including canada)
http://hauppauge.com/html/buy_us.htm

[wildbeast]

Originally posted by RobertH
wildbeast:

check out their list of resellers for the americas (including canada)
http://hauppauge.com/html/buy_us.htm

Yeah I went to those places and none of them have it. Yes those cards where rampant around here when I didn't need one but now that I do they disappeared

edit: Okay I ordered from hauppauge.com website, the order form worked this time.