What is the actual difference between a Hauppauge WinTV Theater and WinTV PVR card?

[aka1nas]

I already have a winTV theater card but it evidently cannot do time-shifting. Is there actually any difference in the cards themselves, or is it just that their time-shifting software only works with the PVR branded card?

 

[wetcat007]

The difference is that the PVR is made for digital cameras, and hdtv and is mostly geared towards more professional editing and stuff.

 

[Chadder007]

PVR stands for personal video recorder. That version has a built in MPEG2 encoder to allow you to save captured video on the fly as MPEG2 compressed.

 

[aka1nas]

Yeah but is there any reason you couldn't do time shifting in software? I wouldn't think that you need a hardware mpeg2 encoder to be able to do this.

 

[Jeff7]

Encoding MPEG2 is very processing intensive work; the hardware MPEG2 capabilities can be very helpful. For one, it can encode MPEG2 at full resolution, which is something like 720x480. I don't know that software-based cards can do this; I think they're limited to half-resolution. The CPU utilization is fairly high when recording with a software-based card too; with the PVR card, it's a very small performance hit - only maybe 4% CPU utilization on an XP1500 processor. This means that you can easily use the computer without it being slow, and without risking dropped frames in the recorded file.
I own a WinTV-PVR. The drivers suck; Hauppauge doesn't seem to be updating them anymore, despite the fact that they still sell the card on their website for $200! Check out this forum; I gather that one of the moderators there has ties at Hauppauge.
But anyway...the card itself is quite impressive - I think its MPEG2 encoding quality is fine; I encode at 8Mbit Variable Bit Rate, and I can't see a difference between live TV and the recorded file. But that stuff chows down hard drive space like crazy.