How's the TV-out quality of HAUPPAUGE WinTV PVR-350?

[DIY JJ]

Should i get a HAUPPAUGE WinTV PVR-350
or HAUPPAUGE WinTV PVR-150 Plus a Video card that has TV-out?

is the TV-out quality for HAUPPAUGE WinTV PVR-350 acceptable?


I'm trying to build a Media Center computer from my old computer.

These are the parts that i'm going pull out.
PIII 1.12Ghz
ECS P6STP-FL with VGA and Audio
128MB PC133 SDRAM
60GB HDD
DVD-Rom

There will be 512mb more ram i'm going to add.
the mainboard only has 2 PCI slots, one of them is already installed
a Ethernet card. if i want to add a video card, i will have to get a usb ethernet adapter.



And i saw some people sell something like this:
on ebay.
i just wondering.... are these really work?

[stefan]

You will not find better quality on a tv-out than on the pvr-350. That said, if your motherboard is incompatible with it, which you will not know for sure until you try, it will be useless. The drivers for the tv-out are worthless, thus the computer will hang, requiring a hard reboot if it's incompatible with your MB.

[MaBo]

I agree with stefan. In addition to his post, considering your machine is not exactly overrated, using a pvr350 to play back reduces the load on your machine a lot. When I'm recording and playing back (different programs), cpu time is still very low (far below 20%).

So, IF it works it may be the best solution.

Greetz,
MaBo

[womble]

I have a similar set up with the 350 and it really helps to have that hardware decoder tv out. the only downside is you cant watch DVDs through it but thats not a problem as anything that goes on the machine is re-encoded automatically.

[jtrahan]

I have a 350 and the quality is excellent, but I also have the lockups. Have any of you tried to update to BIOS on your mohterboards to see if that helped?

[peter t]

I use a 150 and a 350, early on I had some trouble with lock up's on "live tv", cured these using advice from the forums. Have tried lots of TV out type video cards none come close to the picture quality of the 350. I would not use anything other than the 350 tv out

[spyork]

I'm one of the people who has lock-ups with the 350. I'm currently using a VIA KM266 chipset, but I'm in the process of moving over to a Nforce2 motherboard. Hopefully the 350 will like this motherboard much better. When the decoder on the 350 works, it works great. You just can't get any better than a hardware decoder in my opinion.

[DIY JJ]

How is the lock-up occur?
when will happen when it locks up?

[spyork]

The problems I experienced were that the video playback would freeze up and usually GBPVR would be toast as well. Sometimes restarting the service would work, and other times the computer would have to be rebooted. Sometimes the lock-up is so severe that windows doesn't even respond. Some say the problem is motherboard/chipset related, while others say there is an overheating problem with the 350. Some people have great luck with the card and others have terrible problems. Like someone said earlier in this thread, it's hard to see if you'll have problems until you try the card for yourself.

[stefan]

When I had the lockups it *always* froze the entire machine. Reboot was the only way out. It was really repeatable, too. I just had to watch timeshifted tv, and have gbpvr show the OSD on top of it. It never worked more than ten times, after that the computer froze. What I never did understand is why this never happened when watching a recording (even one that was still in progress); to me that would be the same thing as watching it timeshifted. This went away when I switched to software decoding.

Other problems I had with the tv-out was timestamp problems. About 25% of all files (recorded with the 350) were reported as being 12 seconds. This went away when I used software decoding.

A third problem I had was with audio sync. It was *always* out of sync, just a bit, but really annoying. It got somewhat better when I started defragmenting my drive. This almost went away when I started using software decoding. It still happens sometimes, but usually goes away if I hit skip forward and then back again.

And last, but not least... with software decoding I can watch other stuff than mpegs... you can't do that with the 350...