I've narrowed the selection down to these 5, four of which are just different models of the HVR-1600. I'm leaning towards the ASUS My Cinema-PHC3-100, because I read in one of the HVR-1600 reviews that the PHC3's tuner has better TV reception possibly due to shielding quality. Plus, it's the cheapest card with an FM tuner. On top of that, it'd be good to try bundled PVR software other than WinTV. You see, I just bought a 950Q on sale at Best Buy a couple weeks ago, and it's not running well. It's not a CPU usage problem, as far as I can tell. The field order flickers pretty occasionally, AV sync isn't as tight as it could be and randomly improves after you change the channel, and the recordings, while smooth during playback after-the-fact, make the live TV unwatchable during the actual recording. Digital cable recording bypasses the need for a re-encode, right? So it's not like having a hardware encoder would solve any problems? I'd be gracious if you could help me understand what the difference is between the 1178 and 1199. It seems the one with fewer reviews is just newer. I'll probably just buy one of those two and a PHC3, and return whichever I have the worse experience with. But it would be nice to hear your thoughts before I proceed with this little venture. I'd also be open to your suggestions, whether PCI or USB (no PCI-E, unfortunately). Thanks in advance!
I've just tried SageTV with my 950Q, and unfortunately had 100% CPU usage watching live TV. It took a few minutes just to pull up the task manager and close the program. In WinTV, live HD only takes 25% CPU. Does it seem right that my CPU would be struggling to run these PVRs? Could it be this USB stick tuner that's the bottleneck?
So I found out Best Buy sells the HVR 1600, but they don't call it that- they call it by its secondary model number, which is the 1199. Got it in today and here are my observations. So far the performance has improved with the PCI card in these ways: * CPU only hovers around 16-22%, vs 25-100% w/ USB * Channel changing takes 1.5 seconds, versus 4 seconds w/ USB * NTSC tuner functions better- full 59.94 fps interlaced vs 29.97 fps blended But, some of the problems it still has: * 50% of the time I tune in to a channel, the field order is flickering * Occasionally a channel I'm watching will begin flickering as above * Recording HD makes the live TV window unwatchable (recorded file plays smoothly though) I just realized that WinTV is in High Priority mode by default. I lowered it to Normal and now when I record, I can actually watch the program, multitask, etc without a hitch. Recordings are still smooth- I'm not getting a hit when I do other things. Seems that WinTV being High Priority is prioritizing something that doesn't need to be. There are a couple other minor complaints I've been having with WinTV though: * sync issues of live TV after I've started and stopped a recording * 10-second blackout after I press Record (still records that 10 seconds, but I just hate that I'm missing it live) a couple volume issues * sometimes audio is very quiet while recording and during playback of said recording, but is fine when watching live un-recorded TV * during playback of all recordings, there is a slight choppiness in the audio So I'll try the PHC3 next.
How do you have your hard drive setup? Do you have them formatted to NTFS 64kb clusters? You need those large clusters to record mpeg video files. What software are you using to test the hvr1600? You should be getting a better picture with that card, and your cpu usage should be less than 10 prcent. Your recording settings might be set to high. I record at 1.6gb an hour but some settings can be much higher with no real advantage in quality, except to slow down your computer. I have my mediapc intel duocore e2140 with 4x pvr150 (hvr1600 is the replacement to that card) and I'm using sagetv as my software. I can record 3 programs in the background and be watching a livetv program with no problems and this using the motherboard onboard video. Even all 4 tuners recording my cpu usage is less than 10 percent, I can even watch a dvd/listen to mp3s. I would stay away from the 950Q or any tuner without hardware mpeg encoders. Those tuner cards are useless for Livetv (pause/rewind) and you already notice the high cpu usage (the software mpeg encoders can bring most computers to it's knees). I only use the PCI tuner cards. And remember you can mix and match, you can run more than one tuner card (if they have hardware mpeg encoders) on your PC, your only limited by the available PCI slots. Is your operating system vista or XP? I'm using XP, so I'm not sure how my mediapc would operate under vista. If your trying to build a PVR, the only software I would recommend is sagetv or beyondtv, I tried both of them. Beyondtv is more easier to use very TIVO like. Sagetv I've been using for 3 years and have no complaints, works great with the hauppagauge tuner cards. They both cost $80.00, it's a one time fee and you get you tv guide updated every week for your area. Theres also mythTV (free) but I gave up trying to figure out how to program it.
the default clusters is 4kb, that's good for a boot drive or any drive that doesn't have to stream large files. If you only have one partition, you have to leave it like that. But if you have another drive/partition you need to consider going with the larger 64kb clusters. sagetv and beyondtv will be slow when used with tuner cards that don't have hardware mpeg encoders. I expierence that first hand when I try to use my ati all-in-wonder 9600 tuner card with them. Both software run great with the hauppagauge tuner cards. I thinks your problems with the sound and the screen blacking out are wintv software related. That shouldn't happen with mpeg hardware encoders. The hvr 1600 gets it's video/audio straight from the tuner input, it bypasses the soundcard, wintv is somehow altering the signal before it is written to the hard drive. A mediapc will run fine on the amd 3400, my first mediapc was a amd sempron 2800/ 1gb ram and it ran 3 tuner cards/ 3 hard drives with no problems. The only work the cpu does is write to the hard drive, it can write to 3 different hard drives from 3 tuners at the same time with no effort. There might be some other bottlenecks in your computer, especially if you only have one hard drive. Also if your drives are near there capacity or heavily fragmented that will cause problems. I try not to let my drives get more than 3/4 full. I use "ultimate defrag" because that shows a round graph of your drive and tells you at a glance the status. On a properly running mediapc, you never get sync issues. You change the channel it starts up right away (one second delay at most while the hard drive buffers the video). Beyondtv has a 15 day trial, you might want to test your hvr1600 with that software to at least rule out a hardware problem.
