new caputer card Hauppauge 250 or 9700 AIW or something else?

[jkresh]

I have had a Hauppauge wintv pvr for about a year and a half, and have had continuing problems in XP with it, their support is terrible and I am ready to buy something new. I am looking for a card that can do hardware mpeg 2 compression. I will be using it mainly as a pvr, but also once a month my Dad is on CNBC and I will record his appearances and burn them to DVD. I know that for best quality I should record in avi then encode later, and that the pvr 250 cant do that, but the quality I have gotten out of the wintvpvr (When it worked) has been good enough so I don’t need much more. I am currently running a p4 2.26 at 2.53, with 512 ddr 400 (Corsair), a WD 120jb, pioneer dvr103, gainward gforce 3, SoundBlaster live 5.1, and XP pro SP1. The problem I am currently having with the PVR is on some files (seemingly random) the second half of the audio is quite distorted, files recorded recently only show the first 30 seconds if I try to cut with Tmpeg, but they play fine and I can use premier to reincode them so I can burn them, though that seems silly. Finally if I open a folder with one of the recent files, it crashes windows explorer in XP, I have the most recent drivers from Hauppauge (non beta), and have got no response from their support. I am reluctant to go with the 250 but not sure if I want to spend the 400 for the ATI though I do like the card. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Also I know about the vidac vmagic which is really the card I want but I am not ready to deal with a company with no offices in the US, no US tech support, and no way to order except through their webpage using Euros.

[dar1us]

look at the following threads and read them well...
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39432 (strictly s
samples, led to the following site)
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39122 (one of those, whats the best hardware. when someone does a really good one of those threads that goes on for ever, lets hope they glue it down and make it sticky)

there are also capture samples at: http://www.aa981752.force9.co.uk (my little plug, again and again. but the site is too poor to add to my sig:).

TV tuners arn't really that needed much if you want high quality these days, instead, try and output your sat/cable/vcr into composite/s-video and you will get much better quality. I just got a tv@nywhere from MSI, seems pretty good and cheap, it costs about $40-50 (£50 here as there is only one place you can get them, they shouldn't really be in the UK) and i guess about €50-60. It has a new analogue>digital decoder chipset so is, future-proof isn't the word... Up to date (for now).


dar1us

[jkresh]

problem with running through a cable box is at school we don’t have cable boxes, everyone has the same 60 or so channels and they expect you to use the built in tuner in the TV, so they don’t offer boxes, and I don’t want to bring up a vcr (kind of kills the point of a pvr anyway and is extra baggage), thanks for the links though.