Late to the game with PVR-350

[elite]

The 350 is a great capture card - however, I never got the tv out to work reliably on any of my setups... Therefore software decoding was the way to go for me.

[kmoore]

I think I'm beginning to get the picture here (haha). I have two hurdles to overcome, essentially. The first is to "just get it working, at all." GBPVR will provide the minimum spec desired function, at no extra cost to me, and it's easy to install. But, the windows driver has a known issue. Two, if I get it working at all, performance will probably be an issue.

MythTV, running under some sort of Linux distribution, will potentially provide a speed increase AND fix the driver problem. The cost is literally hours of extensive installations, tweaking, problem solving, wondering why I have even bothered.

Does anyone know if Win2k Server has any more overhead than Win2k Pro or XP, assuming I tweak each OS to load only necessary items?

[sub]

Does anyone know if Win2k Server has any more overhead than Win2k Pro or XP, assuming I tweak each OS to load only necessary items?

Unfortunately, tweaking or changing the version of Windows you're running wont really help with your underpowered CPU.

[kmoore]

Ahh, that's what overclocking is for! Celeron 500, here I come!
Oh wait, that still sucks...darn.

[flyswatta]

Can you return or sell the 350? You could use the money to buy a PVR150 & a used 1 GHz P3 somewhere. If you want to save money on your capture card, I got the Emuzed MAUI IIIG for $18 ( +5 shipping) off Ebay a while back. I think they pull these out of old gateway media pc's. Just be sure to get a hardware encoding card - check the wiki to make sure that it'll work with GBPVR. Anyway, food for thought.

[kmoore]

I think I'm gonna give the project a shot. If Windows and GBPVR proves too much to handle (and it likely will) I might waste a small portion of my life on Linux, just as a science experiment. The PVR-350 is going for $100 to $130 on eBay, so I won't lose much if I turn around to resell it.

[kmoore]

IT WORKS!!!!!!

I had some initial trouble. First I forgot to download .NET 2.0 runtime, then I got MDAC 2.8, then Media Player 9. But it works in Win2k Server on my Celeron 400 box. Video quality on this PVR-350, as everyone has said, is EXCELLENT. Perfect. LiveTV works flawlessly, with no artifacts, skipping or anything. I am serious impressed. Now I have to give the system a shakedown to see if it will be practical for daily use. But initially, I'm PSYCHED!

[K.S.]

glad you got it working
if it's working stable, stay with w2k & resist the urge to update to xp. 256 MB would barely be enough for xp, let alone GDI + .NET. w2k takes up a little bit less RAM than XP

[kmoore]

Yeah I'll stay with Win2k Server. I may look into upgrading the RAM on this box but it may not be totally necessary. Actually, I just chcked. 256 is the max capacity. Wow that's lame.
I also added a 27.3 gig hard drive to my existing 18 and I'm formatting two partitions dynamically so they act as one large drive. Otherwise multiple drives in GBPVR is mostly useless, as I found out (without manually moving stuff around).

Another problem I had is some system freezing, but it's NOT consistent and I do not think it's a PVR-350 driver problem. I think it's a heat problem. I opened the case and the processor was blazing hot. I bought a small fan from radio shack that I installed on the factory heat sink and I think it might just solve that problem.

[flyswatta]

hehehe, that's pretty awesome! nice to know that you can still use some of the old doorstops that are laying around. Initially I tried it with an AMD 450 MHz, but I had a software card and the results were less than desirable