Dual DVB-T card

[wrecked]

Hello

I currently have 2 analog hauppauge (1 USB, and one 150lp) tuners in my HTPC, but the signal closes in about a month, so I have to go DVB-T instead.

Im now looking for a dual DVB-T tunercard supported by gbpvr, but can't find any. Can you please help me out here?

Alternative, I can use 2 lowprofile cards, but one card must have an remote to control gbpvr.

Im in a PAL country.


Thanks in advance,
Jimmy

[wrecked]

Just found out Hauppauge Nova-t-500 might do the job, but Im unsure if it will work with my slow XP1700 processor?

[Graham]

The Nova 500 outputs MPEG and GBPVR just passes it along to the disk (for recordings) or to the video decoder (for Live TV). This is the same as the 150 so the 500 should not load the computer any more than the 150 did.

[wrecked]

Thanks!

Do you also know if it will be supported by gbpvr 0.90.10?

Also read something about it being uncompatible with VIA chipsets. Does Nova T 500 really have such a problem?

Thanks,
Jimmy

[Graham]

You will be lucky to get answers re. such an old version of GBPVR.

Ask the Via question on the forum at http://www.hauppauge.co.uk.

Good Luck

[sub]

Sorry, a version that old will not support DVB-T.

Also, unfortunately your machine is not going to be fast enough for Ireland's H.264 based DVB-T channels. Decoding these types of channels is very hard on PCs. Some of this can be taken care of with a H.264 hardware accelerating video card like an nvidia 8500/8600 if you're running Vista/Windows7 with EVR video renderer.

[wrecked]

Thanks guys.

Guess I need to build me a new HTPC. Any recommendations on hardware?

Need 2 DVB-T tuners, and would also like to play HD movies.

TIA,
Jimmy

[Graham]

You need two quality components ...

TV tuner - the most popular in this forum are from Hauppauge and the Nova 500 might be right for you.

Graphics card - digital broadcasts are in some flavour of MPEG and the only strain on a computer is decoding MPEG to show on screen. Get the poshest graphics card that you can.

The rest of the machine (CPU, memory, etc) can be humdrum - if it runs XP okay then it should be good enough.

The fun/anguish will be finding a decoder that will play HD broadcasts - I haven't yet seen evidence of a clear front runner for h.264 decoding. But you won't be short of recommendations in this forum.

[rwnz]

Hi Wrecked.

I've been deciding what to get for my upgrade computer (I've cuurently got an old Athalon with a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150). I've made some comments here that may help you, and also to practice my understanding of all of this.

I found three Hauppauge dual DVB-T tuners - the Win-TV-Nova PCI and USB versions, and the WinTV-HVR-2200. I have chosen the latter as I want it inside the computer (i.e. not USB) and it is a new model with PCIe to suit the new motherboard. I may also use it to receive the analogue signal from my STB as both tuners will do analogue or digital. As a bonus it is also marginally cheaper.

The digital signal that comes in is what comes out and is stored on the HD. So if it is MPEG-2 in then it is MPEG-2 out if it is MPEG-4 H.264 in then it is MPEG-4 H.264 out and stored. The DVB-T cards that state they are MPEG-2 only are refering to the software supplied with them and will be OK for MPEG-4 if you use GBPVR. If this is HD and you feed this over your network to a seperate computer or digital media receiver then this computer doesn't need to be spec'd to process/play HD. However if you want to watch or process it on this computer then it must have a suitable graphics card and processor.

For the graphics card I chose an 'Asus EN9400GT SILENT/DI/512MD2 Video Card, GeForce 9400 GT' as it has been reported by others in another forum as working reliably on our MPEG-4 H.264 DVB-T. The 'Silent' is a fanless version to keep the noise down (it has a large heatsink instead). There appears to be a lower spec and slightly cheaper GeForce 8400 which also works fine as long as you get the version with PureVideo V2 or later. I get the impression that the 9400 has superseded the seemingly popular 8500, but I'm certainly no expert.

For the CPU I decided to go for as high a performance as I could before the price shot up as I want to do some video editing and conversion, so I chose a Core2Duo E8400. These are meant to be pretty efficient which I hope may help keep the fan noise down a bit.

The motherboard is what seems to me to be a pretty basic one with enough PCI, PCIe and PCIe2 slots to suit my expansion cards, and will support the CPU I'm getting. An Asus P5QL PRO Socket T (LGA775).

Because my old optical and hard drives are IDE, I'm replacing them too with SATA, with the hard drive being 7200RPM and 32MB cache to help with the data processing when I edit video.

My theories may be flawed and there is going to be expert advice out there, but I hope this helps you a bit. I found it quite stressful deciding on my components as there are so many choices available. I'll find out how well I've done in the next couple of days when the parts are delivered.

[wrecked]

Wow, great info. Thanks!

Be sure to keep us updated, OK?

Jimmy