Well You Guys Have Gone and Done It...

[EwanG]

After reading around here a while, I decided to take my share of the family tax refund and buy a Hauppauge PVR 350 Card and a MediaMVP. Should be arriving on the 9th according to Amazon.

The PVR 350 will be going into a 900 MhZ Athlon machine running WinXP SP2 and has 384 Megs of RAM. Is that going to be "good enough"? Will GB-PVR make use of the TV-Out of the 350, or will I need to hook up the ATI AIW Radeon's TV-Out to the local box (will be using the MediaMVP for the downstairs computer)?

Thanks in advance,
Ewan

[capone]

I'm not sure that processor will be enough. The 1.75 I put into mine seems like plenty for most stuff, though

[manCREATEDgod]

CPU should be fine (guessing) Really the speed of you HD's is going to be your obstacle as the 350 does most of the decoding through hardware allieviating the need for a high end processor I barely see any cpu utilization (it never peaks at higher than 10%)on my box I have a Pentium M 2.6 Ghz, i run the svideo out from my satelite box into the svideo in on the 350, I also run the audio from my reciever to the in miniport on the 350. I then run video out from the 350 (svideo to my TV) audio out from the 350 into my MOBO input (so i can play everything through one ouput)and audio out from my MOBO to my reciever. The picture is great. I only use the other video for troubleshooting if i need to put a monitor on the box so I dont believe you require a high end video card.

On a side note this project is by far the most stable I have seen running on a PVR-350 i have experienced(I've tried sage, myth and others and dont think they have achieved half of this stability and functionality) Also I'd suggest not installing the driver from the 350 disk instead downloading it from ftp://ftp.shspvr.com/download/ you only should need the INF files all I used is the inf file and the file pvr48wdm_2.0.22280.exe.

Good luck!

[EwanG]

Just to clarify, I bought the 350 and the MVP, and the 350 is going into a box I already have. I don't think I would have purposely bought a 900 MhZ machine if I were buying again today :-)

That said, I went with the 350 in part out of a belief that it would relieve the CPU of some/most of the overhead that I assumed I'd have if I had gotten the 150. It sounds like I might be about to test that theory, and will try to remember to update here once I know.

One thing I've been thinking about, however, is that most of the stuff I currently have is in either MPEG-4 or MPEG-1 format. Can I assume I should be getting out VideoDubMod and doing some mass conversions to MPEG-2? If so, then do I need to install the 350 drivers ahead of time so I'm using the Hauppauge MPEG-2 codec (assuming it will let me do that before I've installed the card)?

Thanks again - from me and my family (who is trusting me not to screw up the TVs).

[reven]

the 350 will playback mpeg1 and mpeg2, so you'll only need to convert your mpeg4 files.

[Guest]

I've got my PVR350 running on a Celeron 500 with 256MB RAM and it works fine. I have a few issues with rewinding some recordings but apart from that everything is golden.

[Satnav4]

How is your topic related to your problem? Did you go to journalism school?

S.

[Doraemon]

Thunderbird 1 ghz with even a pvr 250 works fine. You should be ok.