Originally posted by: mastrduke
has anyone used this software?
if so what did you think of it? does it skip commercials? can you easily burn recorded video to dvd (its not too hard?), and did you just generally like it and find it easy to use?
I take it you mean BeyondTV, since you didn't directly specify which software you meant.
I've settled on using BTV for my HTPC. It doesn't have EVERY feature I'd like, but it's got all the important ones, and it's relatively easy to use (although it isn't really programmed well with the ATI Remote Wonder; it's CLEARLY built with their "FireFly" remote in mind.)
It can skip commercials (or, rather, it tries to create markers in the files that let you skip past them), but I haven't played much with this feature. It won't edit them out of the files for you, if that's what you mean. It has no integrated 'burn-to-DVD' features; you have to use an external program to do that. I just got a DVD drive, so I also haven't played around much with that, but from what I gather it's pretty painless if you record your programs in the right format. It has its flaws (although the new 3.5 version fixes some of them), but overall it works pretty well.
If you have a hardware recording card, you might look at SageTV (I don't, so I can't use it). I also evaluated ShowShifter, which has *great* capabilities for different encoding/transcoding methods, and native support for DScaler -- but it won't let you watch a recorded file while you record from the live TV feed, which absolutely killed it for me. If I come home halfway through a show I'm recording, I want to start watching it from the beginning, or watch something I already recorded -- and ShowShifter can't do that. The interface is also kinda clunky, and it doesn't have an integrated EPG (or, at least, not a very good one).
anyone ever use that card? doesnt take up too much cpu usage does it? was the video quality the same as that of a normal tv?
I've heard you might be better off buying the "regular" version of the PVR250 rather than the BTV one, but everything I hear about that card is good. Quality doing high-bitrate MPEG2 encoding on my software-based card seems as good as the raw cable feed; I can't imagine this card is any worse.