Diamond Xtreme TV PVR550 II Video capture card

[Steve Schumsky]

Does or will GB-PVR support the Diamond Xtreme TV PVR550 II Video capture card? If not; what softwaare will support it?

[jksmurf]

You'd need sub to confirm, but

This Diamond site says "PVR TV Tuner with MPEG-2 Hardware Encoder (PCI), so my guess would be a big "yep".

k.

[sub]

I dont really know anythig about this card, so I cant confirm either way. If it does have a hardware MPEG2 encoder, then it might work, but would require a new section to be added to direct.ini. A forum search should turn up info on doing this.

[jksmurf]

...but would require a new section to be added to direct.ini. ....

sub, I've often wondered about this (keeps me awake at night screaming) and the same issue with BDA devices.

Surely the TV card manufs must be able (or Microsoft to take the lead as it were) to standardize how their cards are recognized by ANY PVR software, using some sort of naming or numbering framework?

This having to add cards to the ini everytime a new card turns up appears to my untrained eye to be a CFWOT for all the PVR software developers.

k.

[EDIT] For Steve: See this part of the wiki to add a card to direct.ini

[sub]

I could probably do away with the bda.ini without too much work (if I wanted to), but the direct.ini is a bit more critical. There are dozens of different ways that analog cards can be hooked up, and ways they're initialized. Most software that tries to generically handle all capture cards by dynamically detecting connections etc, tends to fail misserably on all but those familes of cards they've coded specific support for.

To be honest, its kind of convenient for me, since it gives me an easy 'no, its not supported' for the thousands of cards that exist out there that I have no interest in. It sets the bar a bit too high for those with crappy no-name, uncommon cards... (sad but true)

Trying to code for a really wide set of potential card types just leads to more compromises and potential problems, and reduced stability for all. I'd rather just focus on my favourite cards, then the others fall under the "might work if looks enough like supported card X" category.