HDTV tuner for older computer?

[liston]

Hi,
I am wondering if there is an HDTV Tuner that I can use on an older computer. All the system requirements that I have seen seem to be for newer faster CPU's. I have two computers I am interested in getting cards for. One is mine and the other is my brothers. One is an AMD Athalon XP 2500 with 512 Meg Ram. The other is an AMD Semperon 3400 with 512 Meg Ram. I think I could update the memory easy enough if that is an issue, but if its the CPU, it might be easier and cheaper to just get a new computer. Is it possible to use older computers to work with an HDTV tuner?
Does anyone have any suggestions for a card that might work?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
James

[laserfan]

A really great card is the MyHD MDP-130; not only will it capture OTA and cable HDTV, but it also has HD *output* so you don't need a fancy videocard with it.

BUT it doesn't have BDA drivers and I don't believe therefore that it will work with GB-PVR. It does have its own apps and there's an EPG available for it though.

Mine was working in an old Shuttle w/700MHz VIA C3 w/no problems, and others have waxed eloquent about even lower CPU speed machines.

A very nice card for HD. Looky here.

[zed]

The issue probably isn't HD capture, that takes very little CPU, it's playback that is problematic. And there it's as much (or more) a question of video card, drivers, muxes, codecs, etc. as it is of CPU power.

[wtg]

I'm using the HDHomeRun with an AMD 2500 and it works fine.

As zed says, there's not much to the HD capture. The stream is digital so it's takes little or no CPU to write it to disk. Playback is a different story.

My AMD 2500 has 768 meg of ram and an ATI X1600 Pro and I can playback 1080i in Overlay mode using ~20% CPU. It took quite a bit of tuning to get it that low, but the fact is with a decent video card and a decoder that takes advantage of your hardware (I use the NVidia PureVideo decoder), you can get good playback and performance without the need for a dual-core monster.

As HD recorders go, I couldn't be happier with the HDHomeRun. Dual-tuner, networked, and OTA and QAM support.

[liston]

Thanks for all the advice. Here is what I found. A friend of mine purchased the Haupauge HVR-950. I borrowed it to see how it would work on the AMD Athalon XP 2500. The software that it comes with sucks in my opinion. I was unable to get it working with their software. Using GB-PVR, I was able to configure it to use a different mpeg-2 decoder software and use the overlay manager for the video renderer. It seems to work great with those settings. The CPU usage is around 50-60% when playing an HDTV station during primetime. Recording without playing at the same time takes hardly any cpu.
After figuring out how to set it up. it looks like just about any card might work as long as its setup or tweaked properly.