fawlty99 Posted September 21, 2008 Posted September 21, 2008 I was looking at the WinFast PxDVR3200 H which has hardware encoding but the idea of a card with twin digital tuners is also appealing. btw - I have no need to record analog. Is hardware encoding a useful thing to look for in a tuner card?
jakes Posted September 22, 2008 Posted September 22, 2008 I was looking at the WinFast PxDVR3200 H which has hardware encoding but the idea of a card with twin digital tuners is also appealing. btw - I have no need to record analog. Is hardware encoding a useful thing to look for in a tuner card? No, if you're not interested in analogue recording then hardware encoding is not something that you have to look for - hardware encoding converts the analogue stream to mpeg video via a chip in the card rather than doing it in software and eating into system resources that could be doing something else. If you're simply recording DVB-T video the transport streams are already in the mpeg-2 format so the tuner card and software just have to dump the TS to your HDD without any conversion required.
Shonky* Posted September 22, 2008 Posted September 22, 2008 If you are in a metro area with all digital channels, then an analogue card is probably only useful to record something like Foxtel. Even then hardware encoding is not totally necessary. A halfway decent PC is easily capable of compressing video on the fly using raw CPU. This probably only applies for one or maybe two channels, but given the digital channels exist, it's unlikely you'd have more than that. Your post is a little confusing. Digital cards do not need or ever have hardware encoding. Hardware encoding is only ever for analogue sources. Digital TV supplies an already compressed MPEG2 stream in Australia so requires bugger all processing power to simply record. If you are talking about hardware decoding then yes it can be useful particularly for HD channels if you have a low power CPU. Something about the P4 3GHz is necessary for software decode. A single core Athlon 3500+ can easily do it. The hardware decoders can have limitations in terms of things like an on screen display. Personally I'd get the CPU power and just use a regular fanless nVidia card/chipset for my output (Linux generally goes better with an nVidia solution).
servalan1503560554 Posted September 22, 2008 Posted September 22, 2008 I was looking at the WinFast PxDVR3200 H which has hardware encoding but the idea of a card with twin digital tuners is also appealing. btw - I have no need to record analog. Is hardware encoding a useful thing to look for in a tuner card?Timely post... I've just finished installing one of these exact cards & I'm very happy with it though I wanted hardware encoding. I've converted 4 VHS tapes to avi thus far & it's a remarkably simple process - the quality is much better than expected. I had to return my first choice of tuner card because it sucked at analogue conversion - no hardware encoding. I've just installed all the antenna connectors & an amplifier/splitter & now have it tuned to digital & analogue telly(for Channel 31 ). It's a very versatile card & at $88 from my local computer shop, a real bargain. I already have a set top box, so I don't need a twin tuner in the PC. Just something which makes it easy to record from the telly when needed. Good luck with your decision.
Alfred Smee Posted September 22, 2008 Posted September 22, 2008 If you're recording digital FTA TV then analogue capture is useless. I have used a Hauppauge MPEG2 capture card for converting quite a few old S-VHS tapes to DVD. When capturing a lot of analogue material a hardware encoder is a must.
fawlty99 Posted September 22, 2008 Author Posted September 22, 2008 Timely post... I've just finished installing one of these exact cards & I'm very happy with it though I wanted hardware encoding. I've converted 4 VHS tapes to avi thus far & it's a remarkably simple process - the quality is much better than expected. I had to return my first choice of tuner card because it sucked at analogue conversion - no hardware encoding. I've just installed all the antenna connectors & an amplifier/splitter & now have it tuned to digital & analogue telly(for Channel 31 ). It's a very versatile card & at $88 from my local computer shop, a real bargain. I already have a set top box, so I don't need a twin tuner in the PC. Just something which makes it easy to record from the telly when needed. Good luck with your decision. Ah you've made my decision much easier. Didn't think of analog capture from sources other than TV. So the results are good?
servalan1503560554 Posted September 22, 2008 Posted September 22, 2008 Ah you've made my decision much easier. Didn't think of analog capture from sources other than TV. So the results are good?I think that it's a 'How long is a piece of string question' - so many variables... but in my case, converting 8 year old VHS tapes from a pretty ordinary VHS player via composite video has worked remarkably well. I'm getting conversion requests from family & friends if that's any guide.
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