Originally posted by: htpcguru
Originally posted by: psxjunky
Originally posted by: htpcguru
You might want to call them, I bet they shipped you a 28552 not a 32552 card.
Actually that will be wonderful if they really did that ! SageTV just added support for the "Blackbird" cards in their latest Beta, and I would love to see what the boradcast decoder alongside the new encoder can do to SDTV recording
In fact, if they send me a 32552 and and someone else here gets the 28552, I will be more than happy to trade.
You might be happy about it, but most others thought they were getting a real WinTV-PVR-250 MCE card (32552). Despite what z-buy.com or Snapstream might be saying, the 28552 is not a WinTV-PVR-250 card, and will not work with SageTV 1.4 nor MythTV, it will work with SageTV 2.0 and vesions of BeyondTV earlier than 3.4.4 ignore the encoder chip and do software encoding.
I did contact z-buy.com and it appears that they are shipping 28552 cards and not the 32552 cards that was purchased.
htpcguru: I really don't understand why you are bashing this new card !!! What makes the 32552 a "real" WIN-TV-PVR-250MCE and the 28552 card not ? They are both very genuine WinTV PVR 250MCE cards from Hauppauge ... one based on an older design (32552) while the other based on a newer, supposedly better, design (28552)
32552 and 28552 both use the EXACT same MPEG2 encoder Chip,
Conexant CX23416 ... which contributes mostly to the quality of the encoded video anyway. The 32552 is based on the older Conexant reference design, while the 28552 is based on the
new Conexant "Blackbird" reference design, which along with the MPEG-2 encoder CX23416, also uses the new Broadcast decoder CX23880, which is supposed to do a better job of filtering, capturing and decoding TV signals.
The only fault, if any, of the 28552 is that it is not suppported under Linux yet. So what ? Support for new hardware under Linux has always lagged behind Windows anyway and Linux users have learned to deal with it. Everyone knows the Linux drivers will for this new design will eventually be released anyway ... so it is just a matter of time.
Sure, if I was running Linux and MythTV, I wouldn't be buying the 28552 card TODAY; but I dare to make a guess that most people in this forum are Windows users, and both SageTV Beta V2 (
which is VERY close to final release, their release candidate 2 will be out tomorrow) and BeyondTV 3.4.4 (as well as Windows XP MCE) has support for this new design ... so there is absolutely no reason for any Windows users to not be happier with the 28552.
I do agree that Z-Buy should have informed customers before shipping a different (better) product than what they had ordered; but on their webpage they advertised this mainly for Windows XP MCE anyway, which does support the new card.
Anyway, everyone should make their own judgement based on facts. If you ask me, my simple answer would be "If you are running Linux/MythTV, go for the 32552 ... any Windows users, you are better off with 28552"
Hope this helps everyone here.