Originally posted by: RossMAN
I ordered
this for $129.99 + shipping which should arrive this week.
Does anyone know if it's the Amity or Roslyn chipset?
It is the Roslyn card (which BTV 3.4.4 supports).
see the large picture here. You can read the model number 28552 printed on the Philips tuner box. The two big chips next to each other also indicate tha this is a BlackBird card.
I'm still confused as to which is OLDER and NEWER?
As far as the card
manufacturing date goes, no one is newer than the other ... Hauppauge is still manufacturing both cards as we speak. The Roslyn 28552 is however based on a much newer
REFERENCE design from Conexant. Most card manufacturers very closely follow the reference designs put out by the chip manufacturers. The Amity 32552 is based on the older reference design using the Conexant CX23416 MPEG2 encoder and Philips SAA7115 audio decoder chipset. The Roslyn 28552 card is based on the new Conexant "Blackbird" reference design which uses the same encoder chip CX23416 but a new audio/video decoder chip Conexant CX23880.
Which is Linux friendly and which is NOT Linux friendly?
At the moment, the Amity is more Linux friendly since this design has been out for years (though the actual encoder chip has had a upgrade recently, from the older CX23415 decoder/encoder chip to the newer CX23416 encoder only chip). Due to this recent upgrade, you actually need a patch for the Linux IVTV drivers to make this work.
The "Blackbird" based Roslyn card is the new kid on the (hardware) block, so there is no Linux driver available for it yet.
If you want to be absolutely safe with Linux, pick up an older Amity card which uses the older CX23415 chip. This card is easily recognized by the presence of the black heatsink on the main encoder chip. You probably won't find any of these in retail anymore ... so eBay is probably your best bet.
Which is considered a REAL PVR250MCE and which is not?
As gmessner explained above, only the Amity has the "PVR250MCE" label at the moment. Roslyn is an OEM only card at the moment and hence doesn't have a retail brand name yet (PVR250MCE or PVR350 etc.). I was told by Hauppauge tech support on two different occasions that Hauppauge will be moving its PVR250 series to the blackbird design in the near future, but gmessner has information from another Hauppauge source that when they do that the Roslyn cards will not be called "PVR250" but will probably be "PVR<something_else>"
Nothing is officially announced by Hauppauge yet ... so take it for what its worth.
Windows XP
Media
Center
Edition is an exclusive version of Windows XP that includes a built in Media Center application, that allows recording TV based on a free program guide (just like TiVo), organize your digital pictures, music and videos etc.
Get the details
straight from Microsoft
Basically it is Windows XP Pro at heart, with the Media Center application slapped on top of it.
Currently you can't buy the WinXP MCE by itself. You have to buy a full MCE PC from one of the official vendors which comes with MCE pre-installed. The only legal way to get just the MCE software at the moment is to subscribe to the MSDN Enterprise edition, which includes all preview versions of MS OSes.
Hope that helps