[cyborge1]

1 - Hauppague TV

2 - ATI

3 - HiPix 200

4 - I/O Magic

5 - Aver Tech

6 - Visiontec Extasy Everything

7 - AccessDTV

8 - Other

 

[DAP]

I voted Hipix 200, but I have an ATI Radion AIW as well. The goal was to be able to perform the functions of a VCR with both DTV and NTSC. so far I have not achieved that goal with either. Neither one works with hibernation, a requirement in my situation.

 

[cyborge1]

Quote:

Originally posted by DAP I voted Hipix 200, but I have an ATI Radion AIW as well. The goal was to be able to perform the functions of a VCR with both DTV and NTSC. so far I have not achieved that goal with either. Neither one works with hibernation, a requirement in my situation.

I am trying to do the same thing. I work in a network operations center at night, we are unable to receive TV signals so what I do is record shows on my I/O magic TV card with powerVCR III software and then copy them over to a 40gig hard drive I have in a external USB case. That way I can play them on any of the computers at work. PowerVCR software and the I/O magic card work pretty good but I was looking for a better solution for my home HTPC to connect to a Panasonic AE-100 projector. I have tried the ATI all-in-wonder pro 128 but the picture quality and size is not as good as what I get with the "I/O powerVCR" combo. I recently purchased the Visiontec card, this card is pretty bad. I guess the next card to try is the Video blaster VCR card with hardware mpeg-2 encoding..


I was looking for other peoples experience with the different TV cards to help decide.

I have a larger scheme eventually from all of this testing beside recording shows for work... I want to be able to record multiple ( 3, 4, 5, 6 ) shows at the same time

( ever notice that there is several hours each week where 3 or more shows are on at the same time then for the rest of the week there a vast wasteland of programing!! lol )

I want to record all shows to a large file server that way I can play back any of the shows on any TV in my house ( like replay TV only better! )


Has anyone else tried doing this?

 

[Accooe]

Snapstream may be your answer. Its design as a video server, allowing multiple machines with tuner card to function as one multiple tuner device. Set it to record and it delegates the task to a free machine via your network. It also records in the background so besides a red icon in the tray you won’t know its recording.


As for video streaming I'm currently doing this, though I don’t use snapstream as when I tried it (last year) it was restricted to the media 8 video codec (I think its Mpeg4 but don’t quote me) . I prefer a less lossy codec, PICvideo (MJPEG) which allows me a near perfect recording and if I decide to archive with a stronger compression like MPEG2 or DIVX I'm starting with a high quality source, Huffman (loss less) is better but the software I'm using doesn't seem to work with my current pc configuration. I have had up to 3 machines streaming a file at different points in the file without any problem over a 100 Mbit network.

 

[JeffY]

SDISilk