N
Noozer
NONE of them.
Get a Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card.
You want a card that does MPEG2 compression in HARDWARE.
Get a Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card.
You want a card that does MPEG2 compression in HARDWARE.
T
Tal Fuchs
Hi,
I want to buy a new TV card to replace my good old ATI TV Wonder VE (Rest in
peace
The three came to my mind are:
LifeView FlyTV Prime 30 - $45
LifeView FlyTV Prime 34 - $55
WinFast TV2000 XP TV - $55
Will these cards work with InterVideo WinDVD recorder 5 ?
I'm not sure the supported TV cards in the InterVideo WEB site is updated.
Can you give me the Good and Bad points for each one of them ?
Thanks,
Tal
I want to buy a new TV card to replace my good old ATI TV Wonder VE (Rest in
peace
The three came to my mind are:
LifeView FlyTV Prime 30 - $45
LifeView FlyTV Prime 34 - $55
WinFast TV2000 XP TV - $55
Will these cards work with InterVideo WinDVD recorder 5 ?
I'm not sure the supported TV cards in the InterVideo WEB site is updated.
Can you give me the Good and Bad points for each one of them ?
Thanks,
Tal
J
J. Clarke
Noozer said:
sWhy does he want an MCE board to use with InterVideo WinDVD recorder 5?
As for MPEG2 compression in hardware, that's an advantage for some purposes
but not for others. Is the compression that comes out of the board
directly transferable to DVD without transcoding?
G
GuessWho
Tal,
I've had the WinFast TV2000 XP Deluxe for a couple of years. The original
software had a lot of problems but all the problems I had with the original
software have been fixed in the latest software upgrades. The only problem I
have now it that the remote no longer works. However, that may be a
mechanical problem caused by dropping it. Other than that I'm happy with the
card given the little use I make of it.
I use PowerDVD 5.0 currently and I've used PowerDVD 4.0 in the past. It
seems that most 3rd party software works fine with the various Leadtek
cards. If WinDVD is a problem, you can get OEM versions of PowerDVD 4.0 or
5.0 here:
http://www.surpluscomputers.net/store/main.aspx?p=ItemDetail&item=SWW12247
for around $5 US including shipping.
Wayne
I've had the WinFast TV2000 XP Deluxe for a couple of years. The original
software had a lot of problems but all the problems I had with the original
software have been fixed in the latest software upgrades. The only problem I
have now it that the remote no longer works. However, that may be a
mechanical problem caused by dropping it. Other than that I'm happy with the
card given the little use I make of it.
I use PowerDVD 5.0 currently and I've used PowerDVD 4.0 in the past. It
seems that most 3rd party software works fine with the various Leadtek
cards. If WinDVD is a problem, you can get OEM versions of PowerDVD 4.0 or
5.0 here:
http://www.surpluscomputers.net/store/main.aspx?p=ItemDetail&item=SWW12247
for around $5 US including shipping.
Wayne
T
Tal Fuchs
It's price is more then twice 
Tal
Tal
Noozer said:
N
Noozer
And worth every penny!!!
Tal Fuchs said:It's price is more then twice
Tal
K
kony
A lot of remotes have a rubber number pad that seems to
degrade after a time as evidenced by a gooey liquid between
the contacts and the circuit board. In such cases
disassembling the remote and simply, gently washing the
rubber keypad in warm detergent and wiping the circuit board
with a paper towel might help... or maybe it really did
break when dropped, but I suspect it'd take a really hard
impact to damage it enough that it wasn't reasonably easy to
fix.
T
Tal Fuchs
WinDVD Recorder is very good both for watching TV and recording it to a DVD
burner
Tal
burner
Tal
C
Conor Turton
Yeah but unlike alot of the £30/$30 ones, its not a software one.It's price is more then twice
TV tuners are like modems, there's software ones and hardware. I've
just had my first experience of a software one and it is shite. Picture
freezes everytime I fire up an app or load a new webpage in the browser
and this is on a 3.2GHz/1GB RAM system.
P
Paul Murphy
Conor Turton said:
Unlike many softmodems (or controllerless modems) though, some manufacturers
of TV Tuner software have got things pretty sorted - as you see with
Guesswho's post earlier in the thread, its easily possible to get reliable
TV Tuner/PVR software combinations (although the opposite is still
possible - you have to be careful what you choose). I've had several ATI All
In Wonder cards in recent years and the newest versions of MMC are now
pretty good (provided it's correctly installed, strictly following the
documented installation procedures). Certainly there's none of that unwanted
picture freezing that you refer to at all. I used to have an old Provideo TV
Tuner on a machine with an S3 Savage 4 graphics card and that froze
regularly but it turned out the problem was with the graphics card hardware
not reliably supporting the required DirectX functionality. A replacement
(newer stepping) S3 Savage 4 card fixed it perfectly. Perhaps your problems
are also graphics card (or installation) related Conor?
I'd be all for hardware MPEG encoding TV Tuners if it wasn't for one
important thing - they still use LOADS of CPU power under Windows MCE 2005.
Pentium 4 3 GHz+ systems shouldn't be using 30% of CPU resources when
recording TV programs - but according to the reviews I've read they do. My
All In Wonder Radeon equipped Athlon 1600+ MP only uses 27% when recoding at
the best MPEG 2 settings using ATI's software (MMC) encoding. Given this and
the power available with current CPUs its easily possible to have dual TV
Tuner setups working together. When the TV tuners are running, often nothing
or little else will be occurring to load up the CPU. This differs to
softmodems which are often used under conditions of high CPU load e.g.
online gaming. I personally think hardware encoding is a bit of a marketing
con to suck people into believing its the only way their CPUs will be
lightly loaded and recording will be 100% reliable. FWIW I've had softmodems
and controllerless modems but now its only full hardware devices for me as
far as modems are concerned (I currently have a message saver type modem
which works independently of the PC - try that with a software modem). TV
Tuners are a different story though and software encoding these days is a
good idea and offers excellent value (providing your machine is up to it).
Paul
K
kony
Then you had some other problem. A 3.2GHz system should be
nearly able to capture TWO MPEG2 streams simultaneously, let
alone one.
Hardware encoders ARE the best choice for MPEG2 encoding
and/or when lowest CPU overhead is needed, but relatively
speaking MPEG2 is certainly not a strain for any modern
system.
Right now I have 2 different systems that capture to Divx
(and can do MPEG2 fine too) which is much higher overhead
than MPEG2, and neither has this "picture freezes" problem
for any typical use of the system simultaneously. Those
systems can't be used for demanding 3D gaming
simultaneously, but that's not ideal when a hardware-based
card is used either... it would do MUCH better but
nevertheless be detrimental.
One of the significant problems with the hardware encoder
cards is they only do the one type of compression, usually.
Use of an MPEG2 card to capture to any other format is then
still software encoding. So with that in mind an MPEG2
hardware encoder card is best for that which it's optimized
for, and just overpriced for anything else. The irony is
that if someone actually wants highest quality MPEG2, then
again there is a good reason to NOT use a hardware basd
card. Hardware MPEG2 encoders have a fixed upper limit to
the quality, can only devote as much processing realtime as
the technology allows, while a modern CPU can do exact same
MPEG2 routines, and more.
In summary, the "it's like a winmodem" argument can only go
so far. Winmodems ARE also perfectly fine for use within
their limitations (like OS/driver support) unless you had
some atypical situation where the system was really
underpowered for the other tasks.
T
Tal Fuchs
I'll mainly use it for watching TV, and very ocasionally recording it.
So, loading other applications at the same time is not an issue.
But, still I'm learning something new here
I guess ATI TV wonder is a "software" one too, isn't it ?
I had no problems with it at all.
It died with my old PIII CPU, MB, 40GB HDD (Still under waranty
, CDR,
DVD, PSU because of some electric problems
So, loading other applications at the same time is not an issue.
But, still I'm learning something new here
I guess ATI TV wonder is a "software" one too, isn't it ?
I had no problems with it at all.
It died with my old PIII CPU, MB, 40GB HDD (Still under waranty
, CDR,DVD, PSU because of some electric problems
C
Conor Turton
I had a 9800SE AIW, not a standalone card. Never had an issue with it.I'll mainly use it for watching TV, and very ocasionally recording it.
So, loading other applications at the same time is not an issue.
But, still I'm learning something new here
I guess ATI TV wonder is a "software" one too, isn't it ?
I had no problems with it at all.
It died with my old PIII CPU, MB, 40GB HDD (Still under waranty
DVD, PSU because of some electric problems
F
Franc Zabkar
Most remotes have a 2-pin or 3-pin ceramic resonator. A common problem
is that the pins fatigue and break at the body because the resonator
is not glued down.
- Franc Zabkar
P
Paul Murphy
Tal Fuchs said:I'll mainly use it for watching TV, and very ocasionally recording it.
So, loading other applications at the same time is not an issue.
But, still I'm learning something new here
That's the most common use for such cards. TV Wonders used in conjunction
with a Radeon graphics card (along with All In Wonder Radeons and higher) do
have a special feature called "ThruView" which allows you to watch TV on a
semi-transparent window which can also be looked through to see what's
underneath. This is handy for those wanting to do other things such as web
surf at the same time.
The TV Wonder, TV Wonder VE and TV Wonder Pro are all software encoding
cards, the newest ATI Tuner card along with the eHome Wonder card - the TV
Wonder Elite, is a hardware MPEG2 encoding card but both use different
interface software (Windows Media Centre Edition 2005 or a special version
of Cinemaster software in the case of the Elite and MCE only for the eHome
Wonder) to display the picture while all the rest rely on ATIs Multimedia
Centre for that.
I had no problems with it at all.
It died with my old PIII CPU, MB, 40GB HDD (Still under waranty
DVD, PSU because of some electric problems
Have you tried the TV Tuner card in another machine with a fresh install of
the drivers and software for it (asking someone knowledgeable to help if
need be) - possibly the problems it exhibited were temporary due to the
failure of other components after the power surge? I'd definitely be
checking it over carefully before deciding to bin it.
<snip>
Paul
T
Tal Fuchs
Paul Murphy said:
Ya I checked it in another two machines.
In one machine it won't boot at all and the machune will beep.
In the other machine it will boot but all other PCI cards, including the
Internal PCI bridged cards (Sound, NIC) won't work. The TV tunner got
extremely hot (I can't touch it with my hand).
So, Yes. I'm sure it can go to bin