need help/info for my purchase choice

[jcap511]

I had an all-in-wonder 9000. It wasn't too bad, but i later wanted to upgrade my graphics card. I uped the graphics card and then bought a TV Wonder Pro, figuring i better keep the graphics and capture separate. I'm a bit fed up with ATI now. I've had bunches of issues with the card and even more problems with the software.

In short, i want to get a new video capture card. I want to keep my capture card separate from graphics card so i can upgrade one and not affect the other.

I was looking at models online. The WinTV-PVR 350 looks nice. It had good reviews on newegg, and says it has a real hardware mpeg 2 encoder. (can anyone verify?)

Anyone have any other suggestions, or perhaps some experience with that particular model?

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks in Advance!

[rfmmars]

I have five ATI cards, they work great. What kind of problems are you haveing?

Richard

[jcap511]

the all-in-wonder was great once the drivers and software were set up. (that was a little troublesome) but the tv wonder pro has been very dissappointing. I was surprised to find out it didn't have a real hardware mpeg 2 encoder. And with the tv wonder, the MMC software has disables the pause and rewind tv features, and even the recording feature fails 1/2 the time. I don't really like the ati software in general, so i just wanted to see what others suggest.

[mod]

Hi. I've had 2 Vivo cards and I must admit that the MMC really didn't work for me.. a lot of driver issues.
I've had really good results with VDub. Of course if you want hardware encoding this isn't the way.. but if you can capture lossless, edit, filter and recompress, the results can be really good.

[jcap511]

yeah, for recording that's what i've been doing anyways. It takes a lot of space though. I usually record things temporarily to watch later and then delete them, so an "on-the-fly" low disk usage solution is more what i'm looking for. That's why i thought the hardware mpeg 2 encoder would be good. I guess i could just capture direct to divx or something. In which case I just need a high quality capture card with S-Video. (suggestions?)

Anyone have experience (good or bad) with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR cards?

[Qjimbo]

I've heard that the WinTV PVR-350 isn't much better than the PVR-150 which you can pick up for quite cheap if you want hardware encoding. My experiance with a PVR-150 was bad (audio desync due to apparently it compressing the mpeg audio stream in software) but apparently they've fixed this issue with the latest drivers, so thats probably your best bet.

[mod]

I usually record things temporarily to watch later and then delete them, so an "on-the-fly" low disk usage solution is more what i'm looking for
Well.. IMO if you don't want to reencode, you can also use VDub + ffdshow to capture directly in DivX3 @ 3000 kbps.. the quality is good, the cpu load low and the bitrate not too high..