[justinmann]

I just bought and installed an nVidia Personal Cinema and I thought people in this forum might be interested in my mini review.


On the positive side:

* Watching live TV is excellent

* TV color quality is great

* It does a great job de-interlacing TV, no jaggy lines but some blurring.

* The remote control works very well with the DVD app and the TV app.

* The card I got came with dual monitor output and s-video out

* The breakout box is a neat little device and seems to have plenty of inputs

* Everything seems to be XP compatible (that is only OS I tested this product on)


On the negative side:

* DVD playback is poor. It seems to have a problem de-interlacing certain DVDs.

* Audio & video are out of sync when I record in the TV app. This could be specific to my system, at least I hope it is.

* Expensive (~$200)

* Audio for the TV tuner is done through a wire going to the sound card from the breakout box (one of my pet peevs)

* The EPG (TV Guide) is a joke. It brings up a webpage host by another company. It is not integrated at all with the TV app and is thoroughly useless.

* CPU intensive (DVD playback runs about 35% CPU usage, TV viewing about 25%, TV recording at 352x480 Mpeg2 8Mbit runs 80% on an AMD 800Mhz, you can record higher quality if your system is really fast)


Overall it is still much better than my Hauppauge WinTV card and does not crash unlike my ATI Radeon.


NOTE: I e-mailed nVidia about the first two problems that I mentioned. If they respond to me, then I'll post their reply.


Product Info:
http://www.visiontek.com/everything.shtml


-J

 

[Roger Huston]

I thought the Personal Cinema was an add-on to existing GeForce Cards. I wanted to get a GeForce 3 Ti 500 and add on good capture card.


This will be my first HTPC, but I want a system that is good at games as well so I want to go with a GeForce 3 card and if things work out well, get an ATI card later.


I wanted more than the WinTV cards give and I was hoping the Personal Cinema was an answer. Does anyone know if you can get the Personal Cinema as an add-on to a Geforce 3 card?


- Roger

 

[JB72]

The Personal Cinema card comes in all flavor of Nvida GPUs (Geforce 2, 3, etc.) Also varies by card maker, and I would expect things like PQ quality and scaling would vary from GPU model to GPU model.

 

[Basi]

Hiya Justinmann,



Can you elaborate as to the difference in "capture" quality between the Cinema vs the Hauppauge WinTV card?




Thanks,

-basi