[mythtv-users] Cheap PVR350 Card?

Stephen Tait tait at digitallaw.co.uk
Thu Jun 10 12:52:48 EDT 2004


At 09:08 10/06/2004 -0700, you wrote:
>Thanks, Also I wanted to know what's the differance
>between the PVR-250 and 350?
>
>Thanks,
>Radek

Just to further clarify;

IIRC, the built-in MPEG2 decoder in the PVR-350 is only used if you use the 
TV-out on the 350 to display X. If you use a dedicated GFX card in our 
AGP/PCI slot which you plan to use, buying a 350 is a waste of money, since 
it can't be decoded on the board and then piped directly to the GFX card 
for output. If you use an nVidia card and the proprietary drivers, this 
should be able to help decode the MPEG2 - TV playback with my GeForce FX 
uses 1-2% CPU.

You *do* want a 350 if you're using a mobo without (decent) graphics or 
CPU, such as the VIA EPIA boards. These can't have AGP cards fitted, the 
onboard video is usually quite sucky (although some models do have built-in 
MPEG2 decoding themselves - not sure if this works in Linux though) and the 
CPU's aren't very powerful. Hence they have a hard time decoding MPEG2, so 
you'd want to use a 350 to do that for you.

The newer EPIA boards have significantly faster chips, although I'm told 
they still have difficulty decoding hi-res MPEG4.

Hope it helps. But I may be wrong as IANAPVR350U.



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