Question About My hardware

[malchihi]

Currently I have a DVR system that is running a ATI Theatre 550 Pro, which is a analog tuner. It works fine, but I am looking at purchasing a Hauppauge 1600 for main use with QAM.

I was just wondering if you thought my specs would be up to par with 720p/1080i.

XP Pro
AMD Athlon XP 3200
1gig pc3200 ram
ATI x700 Pro( i could overclock it, but idk if that would help)

I was just wondering if those specs would be able to:
watch hdtv?
record and playback hdtv?

Thanks for your help, I don't want to buy a roughly $100 card, and just use it as an analog tuner.

[Squid]

I currently watch HDTV ( American ) recorded with my 1600 with an Athlon XP 2300 and an ATI X1300. It does an acceptable job, but only in overlay mode, which means no pvrx2.

I don't know where the X700 falls into the product lineup as compared to an X1300.

[wtg]

Recording of HD will be no problem... it's less stressful than analog even because the signal is already digital and just gets written to disk.

The PC itself is beefy enough... I used an AMD 2500+ and it's fine for HD playback.

If you have a problem with playback it'll be with your video card, though you x700 Pro may be fine. You'll just have to try and find out. I personally use an x1600 Pro and coupled with the NVidia PureVideo decoder I get great playback and low CPU usage even with 1080i content. I must say I didn't get nearly as good of playback and CPU usage with the ATI MPEG decoder though, so make sure you test a few if you run into trouble.

[malchihi]

First off, thanks a lot for the quick and very helpful responses.

Just a quick question because I'm not familiar with the nVidia PureVideo decoder. How exactly do i implement this into gbpvr. I just ask, because I'm away from from my dvr box for the weekend.

Thanks!

Edit:
Is the Hauppauge 1600 a good card? I've heard good things, but if you think there is a better card out there I would appreciate your opinion.

[wtg]

First, the NVidia Pure Video decoder isn't free so I'd recommend trying other decoders first. I've heard good things about the free MPV decoder but I've not bothered to try it since I have things working well and don't want to fix what's not broken. You'll find references to it on the board around here. There are several others to try that you may have gotten with your DVD player or with other software too. You just want to make sure hardware decoding is turned on. If you decide to try the PureVideo decoder, download the free trial. http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_decoder.html

Re: the PVR-1600 lots of people get good results with it and it's nice since it does analog too. I already had two analog cards so I went with the HDHomeRun due to it's dual tuners and network capabilities, but it has no analog support.

[flyswatta]

I just installed an ATI x700 Pro with my AMD 2100+ and it uses about 50% CPU with nice playback - this was 1080i video in Media Player Classic using the PureVideo drivers. I have an ECS k7s5a mobo using the onboard audio. I haven't tried it with GBPVR since this is a client machine and I can't stream .ts files.

[malchihi]

Thanks again for the responses. I downloaded some hd video, such as the stuff on microsoft's website, and it ran fine. I'm going to be ordering my tuner today.

[wtg]

Malchihi,

Did you try HD playback in GB-PVR? Playback in MS Media Player is not necessary the same as what you'll see in the PVRX2 executable. It's uses DirectX features and cannot be run in the less resource intensive overlay mode, which is the default mode for Media Player. You can turn off Overlay mode in Media Player (see the Advanced Video options under the Performance tab in the Options menu), but until you try it within GB-PVR, you won't know if the video card is beefy enough.

Good luck,
Tim

[malchihi]

Yeah i opened the video's through the video library(PVRx2), and it ran fine. I know the x700 is better than the x1300, so that also made my decision.