Anyone get Theater 550 working on 2003 Server?

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do you expect a single ATA100 7200rpm disk would be able to handle to IO requirements of recording while playing back

It should be okay, assuming the disk isnt heavily fragmented.

or is a RAID-0 stripe required?

No, RAID-0 is not required. Many people run on lower spec machines than your with a single disk.

When you say "it's incapable of playing back a recorded show while recording another one", what actually happens?

[Zod]

Some of the symptoms I experienced in 2003 server:
- If I pressed "pause" while watching live TV, it would go to a black screen, saying it was switching to timeshifting mode. Then after an extended pause (10+ seconds), sometimes I'd see a brief flash of video before the app would crash.
- If I tried playing back a recorded video while it was recording something, it would flash again and crash. It seemed like a resource thing because it seemed like it was about to do it, but didn't have sufficient resources.
- Fast forward and rewind were not reliable.

In the end, I just reformatted the system partition, installed XP SP2, and got the whole thing working in a few minutes. You're right, it works great under XP...it is quite capable of recording one show while smoothly playing back a pre-recorded show. No issues with timeshifting. Rewind still doesn't seem to work so well, but fast-forward works fine (though I do with that repeatedly pressing fast-foward would speed up the fast-foward rate, with an on-screen display of the rate. Currently, repeatedly pressing FF (ctrl-F) seems to just bring the video back to the point of the first FF keypress).

On a completely unrelated note, my old nVidia GeForce 2 Ti has horrible TV output, no matter what driver version or OS I'm using. The output area is the whole 4:3 desktop, but it easily fits inside the full NTSC field area (with a sizeable unused border around the outside), creating the unattractive look of a computer desktop being shown on a TV, rather than a full NTSC field. Can anyone recommend a cheap video card with a good s-video or component output that actually does a good job of looking like a normal TV signal on a TV?

[Zod]

PS - Thanks for making GB-PVR, it is truly awesome. For being a free, in-development package, it is suprisingly refined and reliable, with key features (like free EPG and web access to recording settings) that are not available in any retail PVR I know of (without major, warranty-voiding hacks). Too bad those PVR manufacturers cripple themselves by leaving out all these good features...if it weren't for their history of crippling their own hardware/software without a user's consent, avoiding cutting-edge functionality like file sharing, P2P, and web-interfaces, and their absurd subscription-based business models, I'd have gotten a retail PVR long before going through all this trouble to make my own. But it is so nice to have software like GB-PVR available to make that possible!

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Cheers.