How can I optimize it to use the least resources?

[thetopher]

Hello.

I did a bit of searching, and couldnt find much. I am running a 2 monitor setup in dual view mode. I just bought a 28" view sonic for movies and games ect. My other monitor is just a dell 17".

So my delema is that i'd like to watch TV while playing my mmo's on the large screen. My digital cable box plugs right into the big monitor. So i was trying to use my capture card to view tv on the little monitor while i game.

The problem, atleast i think, is that my machine cant do both. I was kinda hoping you guys could provide some insight on a streamlined gbpvr. I've messed with the setting a bunch, but dont seem to be getting anywhere. So I can load up windows media player and watch movies and all that just fine. But if i load up live TV on gbpvr my FPS takes a huge dump.

I'm running an intel 3.2 gig /w HT. 2 gigs of ddr2 400. And an nvidia geforce 8800 ddr2 320meg card.

So i'm guessing my machine just cant do both, but I was hoping wtih a little tweaking it could be possible.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[basketcase]

What kind of tuner card do you have? I am guessing it is one that doesn't do hardware mpeg processing, and it is offloading it to your CPU.

If you had a hardware encoding tuner, I bet you wouldn't have any issues, as the rest of your system seems up to par. Not to say gaming would be perfect, but it should be playable.

[thetopher]

I have an ATI ehome wonder. I think it does that, but not really sure. It's kind of a weird card. ATI made it specificly for windows media center edition, then pretty much droped the card.

I'm running it in XP, and windows has drivers for it. Although, you cant find the drivers on the ATI website under XP. Strange card, but it works other than the gaming thing.

[basketcase]

I am gonna make a guess that the "eWonder" card doesn't do hardware encoding. It probably uses your CPU to do that, which explains why you run into problems when trying to game. Depending on the quality you have your video set to, using a software based encoder can take up a very large chunk of the CPU processing time.

Try watching TV in a windowed mode, and then look at your task manager and see what kind of CPU usage you have.

If you have a hardware encoding card, it uses the CPU on the card to do the processing, instead of offloading it to the PCs main CPU, thus you would be able to probably game and watch TV.

[HtV]

Google found this one:
http://ati.amd.com/products/ehome/index.html

ATI’s E-HOME WONDER™ is a hardware based low profile PCI TV solution that features hardware MPEG-2 encoding which allows PC manufacturers to support Windows XP Media Center Edition across multiple processor platforms. An optional FM tuner is also available on the E-HOME WONDER

Hans

[Hairy]

Have you tried using GBPVR with overlay renderer?

If you just want to watch live TV then maybe VLC might be an option?