HDTV Upgrade Plans

[mvallevand]

By adding the blu-ray requirement and removing the need for the GBPVR interface I think you have already weighting things towards the PS3. I know you are saying you will use the HD PVR to capture, but I'd still research playing AC3 files on the PS3, since that will be the audio format of digital ATSC and clear QAM broadcasts here in Canada should you want to use true digital capture. A year ago AC3 was a problem in mpeg files.

Martin

[wengg]

For those of you interested I'm still working on this and having some success. So far this is what I have been able to do:

1. HDPVR will not run on windows 2000. I recieve an error message, "hcwdriverinstall.exe is not a valid win32 application" so I was forced to install windows XP Pro.
   
2. HDPVR was NOT capable of capturing on my old 1.6GHz Pentium 4 server. It would record for about 2 minutes and then skip 30 seconds.
   

I'm having trouble with these two items and would appreciate any help:

1. I can capture with the HDPVR using GBPVR when I don't have any channel changing turned on in config. As soon as I enable the IR blaster and try to record something the HDPVR locks up and only creates a .ts file of 128KB or 0KB in size.
   
2. I'm searching for a video streaming server (preferably free) to access the .ts video files on the PS3. Tversity would be perfect except I cannot access any of the settings. I'm having the same problem as the people in this thread and there appears to be no sollution. http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12334 I was actually using Tversity to stream my standard definition mpeg files to the PS3 when I was running windows 2000 and it worked great.
   

[wengg]

After much time and effort I must report that I was NOT able to capture using the HDPVR on my old 1.6 GHz pentium 4 computer. I did some longer captures and realized that a 1 hour show was only showing as about 45 minutes. Turns out it was skipping every couple of minutes on the actual video file. My only conclusion is that the PCI bus was not able to keep up. I tried two different USB 2.0 PCI cards in various configurations but no success.

[topperdude]

That's kind of a bummer! Based on another post earlier about the Core2Duo requirements being mainly for playback and some subsequent calculations (133MB/s max throughput of PCI should be enough for the 1.5MB/s to 60MB/s throughput of USB 2.0), I was also hoping that the HDPVR would work for recording on a GBPVR server. I wonder if some other configuration (e.g DMA mode?) might need to be tweaked on your GBPVR server to make it work. Maybe someone more experienced might chime in?

-Topper