What TV-Out do people recommend?

[marcel808]

hi,
this is my first post so forgive me if its a stupid question.
I am looking to buy the hardware to make miy PC into a PVR.
A friend has a PVR-350 with MVP which he says is fantastic. But I read that you cannot play DVDs on the PC and watch them on TV, which is a bit of a pain (maybe this functionality will be available one day?).
So I was wondering what the dream setup is. I was planning the PVR350 for TV in, but I'm unsure about output to TV.
The Sigma X Card gets good reviews. But does GBPVR let you work on your PC whilst the XCard displays the GBPVR interface? I have only used TV out cards that output the desktop and they are BAD!

So what's the best; XCard, PVR-350 or MVP?

thanks a lot
cel

[jquinlan]

The XCard is the best options if you wish to play DVD's in their original format, The MVP can not play it because the audio is striped out into another file so it has to be combined into one file for the MVP to play it, with that said, their is a plug-in called DVD2MPEG that will rip a DVD and process it into a single .MPG file that the MVP can play. Check in the developer section of this forum to read about it.

The nice thing about the MVP is you can have multiple TV's interfacing into GBPVR. They are quieter and allot less expensive then building small PC’s for each TV.

[reven]

if you arent going to use the pvr350 tv out, dont buy it, it would be a waste of money get the pvr250/150 instead. dvd playback on the mvp/350 will never happen. only option is to convert them to mpeg2 and watch em like that. i would recommend the pvr350 for tv playback and capture, its really quite stable now, early version of gbpvr there were crashes, lockups, but now its sweet. tv out is just as good as normal tv. the xcard has limited osd colors so skins dont look that good on it, but its plays dvds and all, and quality is excellent.

so what do you want to do? playback dvds, get the xcard. have a pretty interface and just want to playback your recordings? get the 350. dont want to buy a whole new computer, get the mvp.