[mythtv-users] Current wisdom on PVR-150/250/350/500

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Sun Apr 16 05:59:08 UTC 2006


    Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 14:21:21 -0600
    From: Brian Wood <beww at beww.org>

    A 250 is more or less moot, since you can't buy them new anymore  
    AFAIK, but you might find one used someplace, whether it's worth  
    buying would depend o the price.

A pricegrabber.com search for "pvr-250" lists 26 vendors.  Sorted by
"bottomline price," the very first one (Provantage) claims they have
193 of the WinTV-PVR 250 PCI (Hauppauge 980) in stock.  Presumably
vendors are selling out their stock, but many at least claim to still
have them.  Roughly $130.  (Despite recent support for closed-captioning
on the 150/500's [without which they are complete non-starters for my
application], I've heard of enough other people fiddling around with
getting things to work that I may just get another couple 250's for
now even though they're more expensive, because I -know- they'll work
in my configuration, before I upgrade to possibly-less-stable ivtv &
kernel versions, etc.  I'd rather burn some money and save my time.)

[ivtv reports my current 250's as "model = 32032" during boot, and my
sales slips report -those- as model 980's, so presumably they're the
same things.]

Whoa!  And Provantage is -also- claiming they have 313 -350's- in
stock, and they're charging $4 less ($122 vs $126) for them.  That's
interesting, too...  [Type 990.]  Maybe I should get 350's 'cause,
hey, why not, they're cheaper & functionally equivalent to 250's if
you're just capturing video.  [Though they don't have composite
video-in unless you add one of the additional composite/S-video input
cable set, and -those- require a version of ivtv > 0.4.0 and hence a
newish kernel (looks like 0.6.0, judging from mail to ivtv-users but
missing from the changelog---I'll file a docbug on that).  My
application will probably require composite-in, but OTOH it'll be
running on another machine from the current backends I'm running, so I
could use it to test the stability of recent ivtv's for my needs, and
I already -have- 3 of the expansion thingies I'm not using and wish I
could either use or sell to someone...  Decisions, decisions.]

[Everyone but Dell claims "in stock" in pricegrabber's listing;
I haven't gone to any other individual websites to see how many,
for those that say.]


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