Only works with Catalyst Media Center?

[Synomenon]

I'm looking to pick up a Theater 750 USB TV Tuner. AFAIK, Diamond is the only one with one of these Theater 750 TV Tuners in USB form.

Their site says this:

Combine ATI Theater™ HD 750 an ATI Radeon™ Premium graphics card (HD 4600 series or HD 4800 series) and experience mind-boggling GPU accelerated transcoding speed.

Is this "accelerated transcoding" only going to work if I use Catalyst Media Center or will it work if I use third party software like Snapstream's BeyondTV?


Or should I just go with a Hauppauge HVR-950Q?

 

[ViRGE]

Accelerated transcoding means the GPU is doing part of the encoding process. There are other programs that offer GPU-accelerated encoding (a bunch of Cyberlink stuff comes to mind) but I don't believe BeyondTV is on that list.

In any case accelerated transcoding is a function of the GPU, not the tuner. Buy the tuner that meets your needs.

 

[Binky]

My favorite non-internal tuner is the HDhomerun. I'd probably stick with the big players for tuners, like HDhomerun, Avermedia, or Hauppage.

If I'm remembering things correctly, ATI seems to have more of a history of abandoning non-core products (than the others...).

 

[Synomenon]

I had a tuner with hardware encoding before. I like tuners with software encoding because you can choose what codec to use for encoding.

 

[tweakboy]

The drivers will be horrible go with a hauppage HDTV tuner, thx

 

[Synomenon]

I like the HDHomeRun as well, but I still need something that can tune into and record non-HD channels. I only get a few QAM channels here.I don't have a spare PCI or PCIe slot and haven't really had much luck with USB tuners, but they're the only other alternative.