[work permit]

Whats the best hardware combo if I want to build a PVR? Should I go with an ATI 9700 pro AIW, or get the regular 9700 pro and buy a seperate capture card.


I'll be controlling an external cable box, so no need for a built in tuner. I'd like to get card that works with a wide variety of PVR software.


I'm interested in highest quality captures, and I'd like to keep file down to a reasonable size.


I've read ATI card has hardware assist for mpeg2. I assume that only works with ATI PVR software?

 

[work permit]

Maybe I'll kick off this thread with a hypothetical dialog:


Get the aiw. Video soap blows away other capture solutions when you have noisy cable tv sources.


Don't get the AIW. You won't be able to watch DVD's while recording TV.


Get the holo3d. Its the best capture card out there, and its compatible with showshifter and snapstream.


Don't bother even setting up your htpc as a pvr. Snapstream, and other progs stink. No EPG guide is really user-fiendly enough.


Hardware assist for mpge2 works great on the aiw.


If you get the AIW, and you're outputting to analog vga, you're stuck using the vga dongle, which sucks.


The vga dongle works great. It gives a cleaner analog out then the analog out of the 9700 pro.

 

[SHS]

(Get the aiw. Video soap blows away other capture solutions when you have noisy cable tv sources.)

Not from I have seen.


(Get the holo3d. Its the best capture card out there, and its compatible with showshifter and snapstream)

Not everbody has money tree in there backyard to buy this you know.


(Hardware assist for mpge2 works great on the aiw)

I'm sorry but a 5% to maybe 10% it not what I call a hardware boost and all depend on speed of CPU you have vs other REAL HW card like ProVideo PV256, WinTV-PVR 250 min other REAL HW encoder which has no cpuage what so ever.