Video card advice with a VIA Nehemia 1GHz

[urso]

Hello,

I was using a VIA EPIA Nehemia 1GHz motherboard with a Hauppage PVR350 and GBPVR for several months. There were the painful occasional ~weekly complete freeze-ups due to the reported imcompatibilities, and you could not watch live TV as it would freeze within 2 minutes, but now it seems to be dead for good, Windows XP won't boot, not even in Safe mode (after wife hit the rest button after another freeze-up shall I add...)

So, unless you guys know of a solution to the incompatibility problem, rather than rebuild this system, I am thinking on buying a new video capture/playback card. Can anyone recommend one that works well with that VIA motherboard and with GBPVR, and that has hardware mpeg decoding (the processor is too slow to do it in software)

An alternative is another low-power motherboard. I love that the VIA motherboard uses only about 40w.

Many thanks.

[urso]

Thanks, looks like a great site. My card however is a 350 with onboard decoder, which sub has explicitly said is not supported. So I may have 2 problems (MB and card). Having said that, installing those beta drivers may be worth a try. I still need to see if I could revive that XP installation somehow, I get to the screen to choose safe or normal mode, but it never boots. If I have to start from scratch it's a lot of work (it's an original XP disk)

So, if someone could kindly still point to a card with mpeg decoding (+encoding) to put on that motherboard it would be greatly appreciated.

turajb, and you have enough speed for the video decoding on the motherboard? When I tried the image quality was terrible and choppy. I have 512MB DDR RAM.

[sub]

Unfortunately the PVR350 was the only device that provided both hardware encoder and hardware decoding.

[urso]

Thanks a lot. I will give it a shot and post back here. Unfortunately I am having issues with the MB. I revived it by removing the PVR350 card, XP boots, but then it reboots at random within a couple of minutes. I replaced the RAM and the CPU fan which was quite dirty, same behavior. Next I am replacing the MB (I have 3 of them). CPU was at 60C (still ok?).

I downloaded the codec already and will reflash the bios too.

Thx again.

[urso]

Small update. I replaced the MB and put back the PVR350 and the system now works normally. :-)

I am trying to upgrade (downgrade?) the bios for the DMA issue, but it seems you can only do it from a floppy, little problem is that I don't have a floppy, trying to find one!

Now, my system never ever crashed when playing recorded programs. So I am not sure I will gain anything by switching to the MB for decoding. The crashes were at random, but it never happenned when playing, it was likely when it was recording only. Perhaps the DMA change will hopefully fix this.

Will update later again.

[urso]

Still unable to flash the bios, I connected a floppy drive, but it's not seen by XP, no clue why.

Anyway, I changed the video decoding to MB/Cyberlink, it seems usable:

- VMR9: ~90% CPU
- VMR7: ~80% CPU


However, the video quality out of the PVR350 is still better (and CPU ~20%).

I noticed that the heat sink on the PVR350 was boiling hot (you could not touch it), so I added a little fan pointed at it. So far no crashes.

Your method works for live TV.

I'd still like to fix the DMA issue if I manage to find a way to reflash the bios.