[mythtv-users] OT: Buying pvr-350 in SF bay area

[Nick Bartos]

> What are the issues, and what are you currently using for playback? For
> capture?

Just problems with the whole deinterlacing thing.  I had a few threads
about this.  I'm getting frustrated to the point where I wouldn't mind
spending a bit of money just to see if it will work better, which for me I
think it will.


> The output quality on the 350 is very good for SDTV, but beware: With
> the 350 it will be difficult or impossible to get BIOS/bootup messages
> and to play back any video not captured by the 350 (or in standard SD
> MPEG-2).
>
> This means no HD, no Divx, no Xvid, no MPEG-4 of any kind, etc.
>
> If you're only planning on playing back SDTV that you capture, the 350
> will do nicely. If you care about transcoding, DVD archiving, etc, the
> 350 will probably disappoint you.

90% of it will be SDTV, the other video's I have are mostly mpeg2.  A
couple of avi's.  I thought that you could use fb to play back those, but
even if not I wouldn't mind transcoding the avi's into mpeg2.  If it comes
down to getting really good quality for my regular TV (which is 90% of the
use), I would be willing to spend a bit more for extra hard drive space
required for keeping everything in mpeg2.

I do have a HTDV monitor, but it is older and only does 480p on component.
 Since the vast majority of the content I watch comes in off of a
svideo/hardware mpeg2 decoder, I really don't need to use that.  I would
easily trade better quality on SDTV for the very small percentage of DVDs
that I would play on it that may get a bit better quality on 480p instead
of the 480i.

If I need to get into it for bios/etc, I can just switch my tv's input (I
will keep my current svideo-output nvidia card).

>
> Most likely you'd be better off going out through an nvidia card (gf4
> / fx). You should be able to get one for $50-$60 that has a heatsink
> (rather than a fan) and outputs through DVI and S-video as well as
> VGA.

I already have a fanless nvidia 6600, which would seem to be a decent card
for this.  However I just can't seem to get the quality I want.  As many
hours as I have put in this (probably more working on my myth box the last
month than I did at my actual job), I don't mind spending $150 as just an
attempt to alleviate that.