350 vs 250??

[mafro]

Hey,

Im going to buy some of this hardware and setup a system for my house.

My main question is whats the difference between the PVR350 and the PVR250? Is the 350 really worth the price difference?

Ill also probably get a MediaMVP for the scart interface etc.. Will this thing decode divx streams? It says explicitly that it only does MPEG but if you use the GBPVR software does that really matter??

Thanks for your help
mafro

[MaBo]

Mafro,

This question has been raised several times. I don't think THE answer exists. It depends on your money and preferences. The tvout of the pvr350 (which is the main difference) is very handy if you plan to use the pc running gbpvr mainly as personal video recorder and don't want to have a high-end processor. Then you can control the pc from gbpvr for most of the tasks and the pvr350 takes care of the mpeg encoding and decoding. If you plan to hook up a mvp, the tvout is not that useful anymore in my opinion, as output of the mvp will be your main feed for the TV.

Of course, the radio included in the pvr350 can be handy, but there are also version of the 250 with radio.

I bought a 350 and am very happy with it. But the bottomline is that most of the things I do, can be done with the 250 as well.

Greetz,
MaBo

[Guest]

Hi,

my setup has a radeon 7000 with TV out and a PVR350.
I've tried using the TV out of the radeon 7000 and just using the encoding aspect of the 350 (e.g. running it like a 250).
Whilst the radeon is great for playing DVD's and Div X , the live TV is pretty poor , it looks ok on cartoons, but 'normal' telly suffers pretty badly from interlacing effects. I tried post processing with ffdshow, etc , but the TV output of the 350 is far superior.

As an aside, the tv out of the radeon is fine for playing things that have been recorded using the 350. It's just the live tv that is not exactly hot!

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Mark

[sub]

Yes, the TV out on the PVR350 is much than the output I've seen on a regular video. The PVR350 is limited to MPEG1/2 playback, which isn't a problem for a lot people.

One thing to be aware of, the drivers for the PVR350 are picky about the hardware they'll work reliably with. The OSD is known to lock hard on many motherboard chipsets.

[davisj36]

Does anyone know which motherboards do work with the 350 well? I have hard locks all the time and I'm looking at some new hardward.

Thanks

[sub]

It works reliably on my Athlon 64 MSI K8T Neo motherboard. I have seen people discussing boards on the SagetTV forums, so you may want to take a look there for recommendations.