Using multiple tv cards simultaneously in GBPVR?

[seymoria]

Hello all.

I have procured 10 hauppauge pvr 150s off ebay.

Would like to know if GB-PVR can run more than 2 cards simultaneously on one PC. And if yes, maximum how many cards can be used in one machine?

Also, can multiple cards be used for simultaneous recording only or also for simultaneous viewing (picture in picture style)?

Regards.

Amer

[whurlston]

There is no theorectical limit to the number of tuners that can be used. You will pretty much just be limited by your hard drive speed and PCI bus speed. 10 tuners might be pushing it.

There is no Picture-in-Picture functionality.

[psycik]

I thought there was a limit of 6.

[martint123]

I believe the driver is the limiting factor.
PIP is not available, but multiple instances of the GBPVR gui can be opened with a small registry tweak. (I think I got to 5 before my cpu started struggling).

[whurlston]

Yeah, if there is a limit it would be the driver:

http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=3...stcount=13

I've had a 2250 (2 hybrid tuners), 2 HDHomeRuns (2 digital tuners each), a VistaView Saber (1 analog/1 digital tuner), and an ATI 550 (1 analog) all running for a total of 9 tuners. I think the Tuner Status window will only display up to 8 though.

[seymoria]

Thank you for your replies.

I guess the limiting factor would also be the number of slots available for the tv cards in a desktop. I think there are not more than 3 or 4 slots per PC (I have a plain Dell Optiplex P4 desktop). I could just network two desktops together and get maybe 8 slots for the cards.

I am basically interested only in simultaneous recording.

I hope my P4 (3.2 GHz, 1GB RAM) machine would be able to record simultaneously from at least 4 tv cards without any visible struggle as I have heard that these cards do not load the CPU and have encoding hardware chips in them.

I am assuming this I currently have two cards, one is a pvr150 while the other is a Videomate non-hardware encoding card. When the latter is recording, I cannot do anything else on the computer as it really loads the CPU. But I can still do simultaneous recording from both the cards without my machine freezing up.

Regards.
Amer

[whurlston]

Recording will be minimal on the CPU (1-3%) since these cards do have a hardware encoder. Any yeah, the number of slots would limit you as well.