Vid card for Home Theater setup

[Budreaux]

Hey fellas...
I'm sitting here looking at my spare computer and I'm considering converting it to a media center for my living room. My goal is to install 4 x 500gb harddrives and put all my DVDs on it for viewing. The kids tend to scratch my DVDs and with the 600+ I have, I'd rather just put them on the computer and have a menu setup for them to use.
My question is.. do any of you have or seen anyone doing this and if so, what vid card are they using.
I currently have an older Chainteck Ti4200 Limited Edition vid card in it, but I'm not sure it will do a good enough job, if at all and I actually prefer my Ati cards over it. I'm running a Sapphire 9800 Pro card in my main rig.
I just would like to hear from others who may have done or seen this working and get some input on video quality and such. Right now it's just a project, but if I see it will do as I am hopeing, I'll be rebuilding it into a new desktop box (Black Media Horizontal Case) with the 500gb harddrives. (2Tb).... any constructive friendly input is welcomed.
Budreaux

[JT]

You can do it with a fancy video card, but your way better off buying an actual PVR card for your computer. It will cost less and probably perform better. I strongly recomend the Hauppauge WinTV PVR350. All the encoding is done on the card so your not using system resorces when recording. You can also use a multi-switch so you can pipe your DVD, VHS, Charlie and Bev into the PVR card all at once.....well only one at a time, but you just have to push a button to tell the PVR card which signal you want to work with. Total cost for the switch box and PVR card new will be about $200. Far less than a video card that would do this for you. It makes things really easy to put on DVD to. Just use the Hauppauge mgeg editor to crop your recording then Nero or Roxio to put into VOB format for DVD. Or, you could just watch the mpeg videos directly on your computer if you want. This is why I never invested in a PVR box from Echostar. You can do it a lot better with your computer and you can just keep adding more and more HD's, which is something you can't do with a PVR box from Echostar. If you want to go DVD to DVD with just a copy disk function, then you can do it really fast by putting two DVD players in your computer and again, use Roxio or Nero to do a simple copy. This is by far the best and most versital way to go I could come up with. Saves on buying DVD's too because you can just pull a lot of programming right off your dish and put it to DVD. Oh, and one last perk, you can pause live TV with the Hauppauge card just like you can with an official PVR box from Echostar.

[Budreaux]

Yeah JT, I've considered that as well, but, I already have a collection of 600+ DVDs. I rent every new realses every Tuesday and make a copy of them. What I've been doing recently is keeping an ISO copy of each DVD on my computer. I can then use Daemon Tools and mouint the ISO on a virtual drive, which is just like having the actual DVD in a DVD drive. So, in essence, I have a collection of DVDs on my computer and I can keep the hard copy of the DVD safe in it's sleve.
I sell DVD copies to folks, that;s the reason I need the hard copies, well, untill now that is. I've been buring them using the 2 DVD drives I have, (NEC, Samsung) and it takes about 7-12 minutes to burn. Using the virtual drive, it speeds the process up somewhat. BUT, having the ISO copies on my computer is easier to handle, and the kids can't scracth those.
So, will the PVR card also allow me to connect tot he TVs input and use it as the monitor? If it does, then I most certainly need to go that route.

Budreaux

[Budreaux]

Well, JT, I did some research and came up with this review....

I LOVE IT, BUT…

There is one item of contention

The PVR350’s TV out and built in MPEG decoder is what sets it apart from the less expensive PVR250 line of cards (the encoding section of the 250/350 are near identical). I’m a little conflicted about the value the TV out & MPEG decoder adds to the overall package. The built in MPEG decoder only works for signal put through the PVR350’s TV out. Local playback (e.g. a PC monitor) isn’t hardware assisted and is done via software. “Live TV” or playback of prerecorded MPEG clips through the PVR350’s TV out is hardware assisted. DVD’s displayed through the PVR350’s TV out are NOT hardware assisted because they are encrypted and rely on software decoding. DivX playback through the tv out is also a no go.

Here’s the rub: You can’t see your Windows desktop OR the menu’s/On Screen Display of your PVR software through the PVR350’s TV out. Bummer. It kind of defeats the purpose of having the TV out integrated on the card itself. I’d almost suggest getting the PVR250/PVR350 and pairing it with another TV out card except the S-Video out on the PVR350 is so clear/good that I’m torn.

I asked a Hauppauge representative about it and they said:

Jeff Kardatske demonstrated the SageTV UI on a TV set using the WinTV-PVR-350 at the CES show in January. So I know that they have this running as part of SageTV. I thought that Snapstream showed me this when I visited them last month.

Making the UI appear on the TV set is not difficult. There is a video overlay which you can write to which makes stuff appear over the TV. It does not do blending, but as for an overlay it works just fine.

Hauppauge will add the UI to the WinTV-PVR-350 in the future. But I'm not sure exactly when. It depends upon when our engineers can get to it.


There is hope on the horizon though. Several 3rd party developers have built either specialized drivers or software hooks to force OSD/menu display through the PVR350’s TV out. The software capable of doing this is still in the development/Beta stage and I wouldn’t classify it has 100% stable although I've heard good things about SageTV's 2.0 Beta. It's good to see progress made though on both windows/linux platform free and commercial solutions: SageTV 2 ( SageTv 2 reviewed using the PVR350 ) , MythTV with special IVTV drivers, and GB-PVR.

CONCLUSION:
Great card. I unabashedly recommend the PVR350 (or it’s smaller brother the PVR250) for it’s quality and power of its MPEG encoding hardware. The only issue holding it back from earning the coveted perfect 10 score is the TV out overlay/OSD issue and less than sexy bundled PVR software.



So, I'm gonna look a little closer at the overlay progress and the 3rd party deve;opers for a bit and see what has evolved recently... it looks very promising though and I should have one in my media setup, even if I don;t use it for playback, it just gives me too many options all in one package.

Thanks JT
Budreaux

[Budreaux]

Ok, OK.. I gotta step back a second.

I'm now looking at buying this PVR card and SageTV 3rd party app.

I'll explain.

My PSP is a big part of my "outside the house" life. I use it for alot of things.

I've got a couple 1gb mem cards for it that allows me to place 1 really high quality movie on each or 2 high quality, but not as high as before movies on them.

I'm currently considering buying a 4gb mem card to combine everything on one.

My Trucks audio system also uses my PSP as it's MP3 source..... I have a USB connection on the front panel for connection.

Also, with Sony's LocationFree, I can feed DVD player, PVR, etc, through the internet and have the option to to watch anything I set up here at the house with that.

So, this PVR card may be another way to ustilize the RSS capabilities of the PSP as well....

So, I've had to take astep back and remember what I first set out to do, and that is to have my DVD library on my computer and viewable on my TV.......

Budreaux

[JT]

Yeah, I don't watch TV with my PVR card. I use it almost strictly for putting my VHS and live TV on my computer in mpeg, then converting them to DVD. Works pretty good. A two hour movie takes about 25 minutes to convert. I have two DVD burners too, so if I just want to do a straight copy that way I use DVD clone, Nero or Roxio. When it comes to just copying the DVD, they all seem to work about the same. Takes about 12-15 minutes depending to just clone a DVD. Like you say Beaudreaux, it all depends on how you want to use it. It's good your looking into it so close. What I like might not be exactly what your looking for. Either way, an actual video card that will do what your talking about is gonna cost about twice as much I'd guess. Got my PVR350 about three years ago, and it's made a shitload of recordings for me and the quality is fantastic and have had no issues up to this point with it at all. Oh, and since I have such a good LCD monitor now days, I can just watch movies right on my computer. If fact, I watch TV on my computer while burning and serfing the net a lot too.