[mythtv-users] Any reason for PVR-350 over 250?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Monday 12 July 2004 16:06, John Smith wrote:
> Is there any reason to get a Hauppauge PVR-350 instead
> of a PVR-250?

Yes. But whether or not those reasons mean anything in your situation depends.

> According to Hauppauge's site, the 
> PVR-350 only offers mpeg decoding to tv-out and a
> remote control.

The 250 comes with the same remote as well (I have both a 250 and a 350).

> From what I've read in the list, the 
> tv-out functionality of the pvr-350 is only partially
> supported.

Oh, its fully supported. Its just not fully stable. :-p

> Something to the effect that it only works 
> with direct TV and/or mpeg, and not DivX, Xine, etc.
> Can somebody elaborate?

Poke through the archives, its been beaten to death.

> I also saw comments that 
> asserted that there's not much performance advantage
> to the tv-out decoding - cards such as the
> Geforce400MX have some optimizations as well.

The PVR-350 has slightly better decode performance on mpeg2, much worse mpeg4 
decode performance. The biggest win is on picture quality. My GF4 still looks 
pretty damned good, but the 350 is even better looking. People seem to have 
fewer picture quality issues with the 350 than they do with a GF4. But lots 
more stability issues.

> It also appears that people favor other universal
> remotes instead of the remote included with the
> pvr-350.

Yes, I personally think that while the PVR-x50 remotes are better than some of 
those bundled with other TV cards, they still suck. Tiny, flimsy, wimpy 
things they are... I go with a hefty universal.

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/remotes.php

> As for the remote, it looks like a lot of people favor
> a pvr-250/Geforce 440MX (on-board?) setup.

Eh? What does the remote have to do with people favoring PVR-250/GF4MX? But 
yes, there are many people using PVR-250s on nForce2 boards.

> So, any reason(s) to choose a pvr-350 instead of a
> pvr-250?

1) It produces the very best picture quality for TV playback.

2) Nearly zero cpu overhead for TV playback, which is nice if you're using a 
rather slow box for a frontend (like an EPIA, which is what I'm doing).

3) If you run into problems using the 350's output, you can always just use it 
like a 250 and output through a video card instead.

> Or do some people prefer something other than 
> the pvr-x50's or even software encoding?

I'll take a PVR-x50 over a software-encoding card any day.

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE
jcw at wilsonet.com

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