TV Tuner Card Owners. a question for you all.

[shurato]

I currently have a Pinnacle PCTV that i picked up for 20 bucks after rebate from COMPUSA. One thing that puzzles me is the minimum requirements for the card which I think is like a 450mhz+ computer. I want to throw the card into a spare 266mhz machine with my extra 19" monitor so I can just use it for TV but the minimum requirements are too high.

However, I go on Hauppage's site for their cards and their min requirements are a 90mhz Pentium PC. It also states that all of the processing is done on the card so it does not really eat up much of your cpu at all.

So is the difference just in the different design of the cards or is my Pinnacle card like a winmodem, where a significant amount of processing is done by my cpu. It seems like the Hauppage line of tv tuner cards are the only ones with such a low system requirement.

I dont like having to use my main rig as my TV in my room even tho I do have a GF4 with dual display so that I can watch TV fullscreen on my 2nd monitor. I want to put the TV on a seperate computer. Getting a regular tv isnt really an option for me as my room is very small and I dont want to add to the clutter. Should i get the Hauppage line of cards?

 

[propellerhead]

Instead of spending more on a Haup card, why not just upgrade that 266 Mhz machine?

PS. I have three monitors on my PC and I watch TV on it too.

 

[MulLa]

Hi

I've got a winfast TV2000Dlx on a celeron 300A machine with 384MB of RAM. The box on winfast I think specifies 300Mhz + 64MB ram. Sorry don't have the box on me It plays TV ok on fullscreen mode although barely. If I try to do something else at the same time it's really slow. Recording is ok if I do it in RAW format as soon as I do compression even MPEG1 it skips frames like hell. I do have a 7200rpm drive in there tho.

Hope it helps.

 

[Peter]

Viewing TV does not involve the CPU at all. After the setup is done, the TV card pumps the video stream DIRECTLY into an offscreen "overlay" buffer in the graphics card; and the graphics card's engine then combines this overlay into the main display image. Sound goes directly to the sound card's mixer unit, without being digitally processed at all.

CPU load: Zero.

Anything with a free PCI slot and an overlay-capable PCI or AGP VGA will do.

Doing other things with the video stream, like recording to HDD in compressed or uncompressed fashion, will require some sort of CPU and HDD performance.

 

[Viper96720]

Should be fine if just for TV use.

 

[rbV5]

Viewing TV does not involve the CPU at all

Actually it can be quite stressful on your CPU. The video stream still needs processing such as deinterlacing before being displayed on a progressive scan computer monitor.

 

[chsh1ca]

Originally posted by: Peter
Viewing TV does not involve the CPU at all. After the setup is done, the TV card pumps the video stream DIRECTLY into an offscreen "overlay" buffer in the graphics card; and the graphics card's engine then combines this overlay into the main display image. Sound goes directly to the sound card's mixer unit, without being digitally processed at all.

CPU load: Zero.

Anything with a free PCI slot and an overlay-capable PCI or AGP VGA will do.

Doing other things with the video stream, like recording to HDD in compressed or uncompressed fashion, will require some sort of CPU and HDD performance.

This is highly inaccurate. It depends on what the software used to view the TV stream does. For example, I use xawtv + ATI TV-Wonder on my 1.2GHz T-Bird. There are two modes I can use: Overlay, and Grabdisplay. Overlay works fine without a hitch and adds little CPU load as you suggest. Grabdisplay puts a whole lot of load on the CPU to handle scaling the image up and cleaning it up. Upwards of 40% (which is a lot for a TV app). If I have xawtv open and do other things in grabdisplay mode, it chunks and chops and slows down, whereas with overlay, it runs ultra smooth. It all really depends on what the software you're using to watch TV does when you view it.
The viewer software has to support overlaying in order for that to be true.

The system I use it on is Optimus in my Rigs.

 

[shurato]

Originally posted by: propellerhead
Instead of spending more on a Haup card, why not just upgrade that 266 Mhz machine?

PS. I have three monitors on my PC and I watch TV on it too.

Don't think I can upgrade a 266mhz machine by much...would be wasting money if i would do that. I'm trying to spend no money if possible. I don't really intend on capturing and the likes...just want to view tv.