Is it all worth it in the end?

[perf]

I bought a PVR-USB2 and an MVP the other week and got them up and running with GBPVR and my cable box right away. Good quality watching recordings (no AVIs) and live TV. I had no previous experience with GBPVR at all (but with ShowShifter) - my intention was to use them with Sage TV, but I tried GBPVR first and was satisfied. The only point being: with GBPVR, the MVP can work very well without tweaking.

/Per

[paperchaser]

Aside from the tips here, I also found divx playback to be much better when the divx file is on a separate drive from the default gbpvr installation. As you read above, the divx is encoded to mpg "on the fly", and that temp file is created on your default gbpvr drive. So if your pc is reading/writing to the same drive for divx, then that could be the bottleneck that is causing stuttering. Once I moved the divx files to a separate (external usb) drive, my divx files played smoothly.
Frankly, divx playback is nice, but I've stopped monkeying with it and opted for low bitrate mpeg 1/2 as my archive format, its so much simpler. When we start seeing 7 or 8 ghz CPU's, then I'll take another look at divx. Then again, maybe hauppage will put hardware divx decompression into the mvp by then ;-)

[tieke]

TV quality is OK on the PC, the picture is a bit grainy but the picture and audio are smooth, on the MVP the picture/audio stutter and break up, have tried both 802.11g and ethernet (ethernet gives some improvement but still not good)

No doubt you have already done so, but my initial problems with this were solved with the Hauppauge TCP/IP optimisation file.

[EwanG]

I understand that this is not a Tivo, and I am up for spending some time to tweak it to get it to work, but is it worth it?

Why of course not. But that's where my service comes in. Just give me your address, and I'll send a prepaid box that you can stuff those nasty old things in, and then take them off your hands so that you don't have to be worried about these sorts of things anymore...

- For anyone who might not be sure...