I've gone through a few forums and gotten some information, and I wanted to ask the forum's opinion in straightforward dialogue. I have a PIII 733 with 400MB ram in it. I want to set it up to record TV, which I can later burn to DVD, and I guess I'm just asking if its too slow. Basically, it seems I should get either the Hauppauge 150 or the 350, if any thing at all. The most important thing I want it to be able to do is record television while I listen to MP3s. Being able to watch TV and record is good too, but I can live without it. I'm not worried about how long it'll take to re-encode, I can do it overnight. Do you think I'll need the hard-encoder on the 350? Are there any other perks to the 350 that would make it worth getting anyway? Or is the machine just too slow.
Doesn't matter what card you get, your machine is probably going to be too slow. Even with the hard encoder on the 350, your CPU and hard drive cannot write the information to disk fast enough. It'll crash. Grab the 150 (I'd prefer the 250 myself), and use the rest of your cash on a serious computer upgrade.
I had thought as much. The card is the only investment I'm willing to make right now; maybe at some point I'll get a newer machine. I had read a post in another forum about someone getting it working on an 800mhz machine, so I am going to talk to him about it; I do want to ask, however, is if the 350's onboard encoder will make a difference (even if its not enough). I mean if this fellow can get a 150 to work on an 800, maybe the 350's onboard will be able to get my 733 to work. I just don't know what the feature is worth. Thanks for the advice
Speed wise, the 150 is no better than the 350, or the other way around. Even the 250 and 500 would be classed as the "same speed". The amount of information written to the hard drive is the bottleneck in a slower system. You cannot be doing ANYTHING else on the computer while capturing. You have to strip windows down to bare components, no anti-virus, popup blockers, nothing in the taskbar. End task (CTRL+ALT+DEL) everything except systray and explorer. (In XP, end services too). Start your capture software, turn off real-time viewing, and hope for the best. Now...that said, if you capture at half D1 or 1/4D1, you stand a much better chance of getting a complete capture. Smaller framesizes require less bitrate, meaning less data to write to the drive.
