<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/22/05, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:kteague@speakeasy.net">kteague@speakeasy.net</a></b> <<a href="mailto:kteague@speakeasy.net">kteague@speakeasy.net</a>> wrote:
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><snip><br><br>After
reviewing these products, I was under the impression that they're
hardware *tuners* that do not perform any hardware encoding (which is
left to the CPU/software). They have a new HD-5000 card that
appears to boast more features than the previous card, with limited
hardware support for demux'ing, but it doesn't appear as if it does
full hardware encoding. This card is also able to receive
unencrypted digital signals, so I believe my type of setup will fall
under this category, and I should be able to use this card (if it's not
simply just a tuner).<br><br><a href="http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=46&osCsid=7c5c1287a18541561a83e932b1d7c8fd">http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=46&osCsid=7c5c1287a18541561a83e932b1d7c8fd
</a><br><br><snip></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
You are correct, they are hardware tuners and they don't perform any
hardware encoding. The reason they don't need to do this is that
ATSC video is already encoded and compressed into MPEG2 before it is
broadcast. The video recorded by the HD-3000 and Air2PC cards is
just streamed over the bus directly to the hard disk with very little
CPU involvement. I have two HD-3000 cards and can record with
both at the same time while using less than 5% of a 3Ghz Pentium4
CPU. Playback on the other hand, requires quite a bit of CPU
time. I average about 85-90% CPU usage when playing back 1080i
HDTV.<br>
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