TV Cards Comparison

hi

i have a leadtek winfast tv2000xp card. The supplied software is pretty
useless, I haven't fully tried with snapstream software but that is a much
better option than the supplied software. Although the winfast remote may
not work on snapstream.

I think one of the hauppauge cards would be better, u definately need
hardware encoding, unless you want to dedicate a fast system to just PVR
because u can't do much whilst it is running.

my advice, buy a tivo...



"ComeMon!" wrote in message
om...
From: (ComeMon!)
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter
Subject: TV Cards Comparison
NNTP-Posting-Host: 210.3.99.250
Message-ID:

Hi,

I'm looking for a TV card with below functions:

1. TV viewing & recording in NICAM. TV display quality comparable with
that of ordinary television.
2. TV recording prefer in MPEG-2 or above format.
3. Scheduled TV recording.
4. Able to interface with video cam & TV recorder (even with older
tape recorder).
5. Able to play & re-record video recorded from video cam or TV
recorder.

I would like if anyone have experience playing with below cards have
comments on below cards:

1. Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350
2. Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250
3. Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP Expert
4. Leadtek WinFast TV2000 XP Deluxe
5. Grandmars PV-256/PV-256T

Which card has the best performance regarding above 5 points ?

I'm not an expert in this area and from the cards' specification
available on site, I can't do an apple to apple comparison since every
vendor just saying the things that farvorite them and they don't have
a common specification for easy comparison.

I would like to know if hardware MPEG encoding & decoding does make
significant difference from user point view regarding TV viewing &
recording. How different their consumption on computer resource e.g.
CPU usage ?

Now I use KWorld's KW-TV868-DIM PCI MPEG TV card for viewing TV
programme. Its best video quality is fair (I can't say it good because
its best quality is still somewhat inferior compare to ordinary
television quality). This card could hardly do TV recording (although
it has this function) because it skip some many frames while
recording. Also, it's software support recording in AVI format only.

In my city the price of WinTV-PVR-250 is about 2.5 times that of
Grandmars product. Is the price difference worth the performance ?

My PC now run with Althon 1700+ CPU, 256MB RAM, using Maxtor 7200rpm
HD.

Tks!

"timmy" wrote in message ...
It seems tivo is just suitable for automate TV programmes recording
but I need more besides that e.g. watch TV live without need to add
additional device and do some video editing on computer.

ok fair enuf but don't expect wonders. my advice if you are wanting to do
video editing and have a good tv card as well is to go with the haupage
as they have hardware encoding.

Besides, it seems that tivo service covers mainly the US area

yes thats right, the US and the UK. There is some unofficial ways of using
tivo in other countries. The format for generating the guide data is open
source, in Australia there are quite a few users and program data is
available online (eg oztivo - minnie.tuhs.org), and I am in the process of
making tivo guide data for my own country, New Zealand.

cu

tim

ThankQ