[mythtv-users] Are there advantages to using a Hauppauge 350 for MPG-2 display on a monitor?

[John Turnbull]

I hope that this is not a double post, as I tried sending this before I
registered, so sorry to all if it is, but I am interested in the
answers. Thank you.

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I am considering buying either a Hauppauge PVR 250 or 350, but I am a
little confused regarding the differences.

Am I correct:

Both do hardware compression with a MPEG-2 encoder so that recording a
show uses very little CPU resources.

Only the PVR 350 does hardware MPEG-2 decoding so that existing MPEG-2
files on your computer, from any source, can be played back through the
TV out to a TV set while using little CPU resources.

(Oh yes, the 350 has an FM tuner, but I do not care. . .)

My real problem is that I do not have a TV but have a large investment
in large, very good glass monitors and plan to watch TV on these. I
expect that I would tend to burn DVDs if I wanted to save recorded
shows, but I might - vary occasionally - pump a recoded show out to an
existing VCR.

Now the PVR-250 does have TV out, but not hardware decompression. Would
software decompressing be fast enough to record to a VCR on a PIII duel
processor at 700MHz with 512 MB memory - assuming that the machine was
doing nothing else?

Does the PVR-350 offer any advantage with Hardware decoding when
displaying on the Computer Monitor.

If the PVR-250 is OK, should I be considering the PVR-150s.


The specifications in the Hauppauge page is not clear on these points.

Thank you.  John T


-- 
John Turnbull <stuff4_john at yahoo.ca>