I am in the process of researching what i need to build my own pvr. I haven't puchased my video card yet and would like to know what i need and what i should get. Thought that I could benefit from others out there who have already set theirs up. I will be hooking up to a starchoice reciever for the imput and will be running a 3.0 ghz, running xp with hyper threading, 915 chipset. I have searched the forums but have not found a list of things I will need for this to work. I have picked up on some things from the forums including the need for a usb-uirt to be able to change channels on my dish. Although i consider myself to be more that capable to get around and build or work on computers, I am self taught and cannot write any script.
Thanks for any suggestions
Jim
morning Jim, welcome to the forum :->
You sound in a similar position to myself a few months back, no real programming experience but self taught 'fiddler' willing to give everything else a crack to finetune it all...
The basic spec youve listed sounds good. A lot of the time the RAM and overall speed of your system is more critical than the actual grunt of your machine, so most people use at least a full gb of RAM, along with fast HDDs.
for the video card, id say the important aspects are in no particular order, DX9 compatible, Video Out quality (if youre planning to hook up a TV) and if your PVR is going to be based in the lounge, one thats either passivly cooled or got a very quiet fan on it is also desirable. Some of the posters here put their spec in their signature, that can be a quick way of figuring what level of spec you should be looking at. you can get away with a very good integrated graphics, but not many of these are DX9 compatible. a 'full-on gaming' spec card isnt really needed.
If you're considering buying a Hauppage PVR 350 for its hardware decoder/video out abilities, do a lot of research of it, as its very picky about what motherboard its on. Some (like me thankfully) dont seem to have problems, others have no end of problems with them. Ive read a lot of posts about people having to disable HyperThreading for example.
Also, the usb-uirt isnt your only option with controlling the receiver. I use a MCE2005 which comes with two blasters on it and use software called HIP to control it and it works quite well. You other option is to get a Hauppage PVR 150 (the retail version i think - you'd have to check) which comes with a blaster built in already, and i believe GBPVR already supports this. Seeing as you need a tuner card to feed the receiver into your PC anyway, that might be your cheapest option rather than buying seperate pieces of hardware to do the same job.
Anyway, hope that gives you a few leads to work on!
Rick
Rick,
Thankyou for the handshake and the quick response.
I never thought of looking at the specs in their signature. I do some video editing so having to disable ht would be a pain so I will have to reseach that a little more. I'm going to TO this weekend for a Hockey tourney so I hope to get into some stores to get the proper card specs.
Jim
@Tipstir
Don't forget, that the AMD64 is cooler and more energy-efficient. If someone built a HTPC (perhaps Barebone, or small Desktop) this criteria is much important =)