[mythtv-users] OT: Buying pvr-350 in SF bay area

[Louie Ilievski]

> The output quality on the 350 is very good for SDTV, but beware: With
> the 350 it will be difficult or impossible to get BIOS/bootup messages
> and to play back any video not captured by the 350 (or in standard SD
> MPEG-2).
>
> This means no HD, no Divx, no Xvid, no MPEG-4 of any kind, etc.
>
> If you're only planning on playing back SDTV that you capture, the 350
> will do nicely. If you care about transcoding, DVD archiving, etc, the
> 350 will probably disappoint you.

I posted recently on using my PVR-350 again after using Nvidia for a while.  I 
had said that the 350 displayed a perfect interlaced picture, while using the 
framebuffer/Xv, not using the hardware decoder.  Also, CPU usage was only 
around 20-25% on the Celeron 1.3GHz that I had it in while playing back a 
recording.  Therefore, it will be able to play any video format just fine, 
including Divx, Xvid, etc.  The Xv driver for it has come a long way and 
really performs remarkably well now.  Thanks to John Harvey for that one!

~Lou