TV tuner card question

[Mloot]

I've got a question for all you PVR gurus:

I know one of the main differences between cards like the Leadtek WinFast and the Hauppauge PVR250 is that the Leadtek uses software encoding (with a resultant drain on CPU cycles) and the Hauppauge does hardware encoding. I'll be building a dually in the next couple of weeks (so CPU drain shouldn't be a problem), and I was wondering if, aside from the different way the two cards encode video, are there any other major differences that would warrant spending twice as much for the Hauppage as the Leadtek? TIA for any input you guys could give me.

 

[TheBoy]

I dont know anything about the Hauppauge but I have a Leadtek Winfast (think it might be a deluxe). It works fine for me. On the whole the software is good, although I think it could be better in a few areas. For example when you press record it displays record in the top right hand corner of the screen and the only way to get rid of it is to put the control panel over the top of it and take it away again.

It was probably just a one off but I had a hell of a time installing this, lots of BSODs I seem to remember.

Hope this helps

 

[Pauli]

If you plan on making your machine for time-shifting and Tivo-like functionality, the Hauppauge is the better choice. It is supported by all of the popular software packages like BeyondTV and Sage. If you plan on just recording the occasional TV show or transferring video from your camcorder or VCR, then the Leadtek should serve you well.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: TheBoy
I dont know anything about the Hauppauge but I have a Leadtek Winfast (think it might be a deluxe). It works fine for me. On the whole the software is good, although I think it could be better in a few areas. For example when you press record it displays record in the top right hand corner of the screen and the only way to get rid of it is to put the control panel over the top of it and take it away again.

It was probably just a one off but I had a hell of a time installing this, lots of BSODs I seem to remember.

Hope this helps

What resolution is this at? From the bit I've done with Xvid, I've seen that full screen has considerably more CPU impact than quarter resolution, which makes sense - more data to deal with per second. I'd imagine that MPEG2 is similar, but I don't know how it scales. I know that my PVR-350 handles full-screen MPEG2 nicely. It actually uses a software MPEG2 decoder for output to the monitor (it has a hardware decoder too, but that's only for TV out. Weird design.), so there's some CPU usage. Right now, it's recording something and showing ~20% CPU utilization on a 1.9GHz Tbred. That's probably the MPEG2 decoder software though.
I did have a PVR-PCI, which only had an MPEG2 encoder - the video window was played live, not encoded and then decoded like on the PVR 250 and 350. So the thing gave almost no CPU utilization - even when encoding full-screen MPEG2, it would give about 4% CPU utilization if that. So I'd have to say that Hauppauge's hardware MPEG2 encoder is pretty decent. The drivers leave something to be desired, but they're adequate. Check the link in my sig for a good forum for Hauppauge products.
Hopefully that helped a bit; I'm rather tired right now, so hopefully it's not gibberish.