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TV-Out card requirements

post #1 of 8
10/24/06 at 8:42am
Thread Starter 
First-timer to setup a PVR on the PC to display on the TV.

I have a PCI video capture card Avermedia M179-D with on-board hardware MPEG2 encoder.

PC is an Intel Celleron 1.1Ghz (w/Application accelerator), Win XP SP2, 384Mb Ram.
Available PCI slots & APG Universal 1x 2x 4x 2.0 slot.

?
Are there any special requirements for a suitable TV-Card, or will any old S-Video card do the trick? i.e. since I have no gaming intentions there's no need for a fancy Radeon high memory card -Right?
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post #2 of 8
10/24/06 at 10:24am
That IS a video capture card. If you mean just a video card, then you don't need anything special. I'd get a Matrox G400 or G450 or like a Radeon 7xxx series card if I needed a video card just for video. (I wouldn't get an nVidia, because the 2d image quality is lower, at least for the cheap cards.) All of those will be $30 MAX.
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post #3 of 8
10/26/06 at 6:20am
Thread Starter 
Great, I've ordered the MSI GeForce MX 4000 / 64MB DDR / AGP 4x/2x / VGA / TV Out / Low Profile / Video Card .
Will this card will perform the TV Decoding and this setup allow me to watch a previously recorded show, while simultaneously recording/capturing another?

Must I disable my on-board video for this card to run the PC-CRT in addition to the TV ?

edit: Whoops! I now see this is an nVidia card -didn't intend to go against advice given. Will see how it goes with this $10 card.
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post #4 of 8
10/26/06 at 10:10am
It's not going to be bad, image quality will probably be just a little bit worse. The video card doesn't do TV decoding, the video capture card you linked earlier does for TV, and your CPU does for already recorded video. The video card just dictates the speed at which things can be drawn on screen. Additionally, you can use the TV out if you want to play computer games on a TV or use your computer as a scaler (with something like DScaler). And yes, you should disable your onboard video with it.

The latest video cards have video acceleration for stuff like H.264. But you don't really need it.
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post #5 of 8
1/8/07 at 7:16am
Thread Starter 
Just an update: At home tech progress is slow with holidays & NC weather, but yesterdays' rain allowed me to set this up.

The above nVidia card never arrived, they cancelled the order after 3 weeks. I purchased the MSI Radeon 9250 T-128 for 3D and TV-out. And installed the Avermedia 179 card with the Avermedia software.

It works great: 7yo can now play 3D games; TV-out works fine; Time-shift (pause/record live TV) works great. Tried to install Sage, but appearantly my tuner card version is not supported as it could not find it. The kid watched NICK on the PC while I enjoyed the game on FOX.

XP is too easy: the 9250 card install disabled the on-board video on its' own.

My only issue is more than 1sec audio delay, every other time I launch into TV mode.
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post #6 of 8
1/10/07 at 10:33am
you prob need to jump over to the htpc forums. to continue. but depending on what else yuo have going on the 1sec dely shouldnt be happening. does this only happen when you are cacheing the show for pvr timeshifting function? if so it might be the hard drive memory issue. I know when i was using a cellery 1.1 and would timeshift it would sometimes happen. until i upped the memory to 512.
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post #7 of 8
1/10/07 at 4:36pm
Thread Starter 
The audio delay appears to occur randomly, it has not occurred during a Time Shift so far.
I do only have 320MB (PC100) RAM in this old PC. Was figuring that the 128MB video card and the tuner card on-board decoder would relieve the system RAM, rather than impair it. But I'll PU a 256 stick to max this MB at 512.
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post #8 of 8
1/10/07 at 7:26pm
it doesnt impair it but you can have the thing caching causing issues. one thing to consider is if you have the funds you can upgrade your normal pc and use the one you have now as the htpc and the htpc move it over to storage.
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