HTPC, TV-Tuners and DVD Quality

[Rhombuss]

Currently considering building an HTPC for a second theatre room in my house. Also considering purchasing the Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 card. Have the following questions to ask:

I have a Radeon 8500LE with S-Video out, so which one would be better in terms of outputting video to TV? The TV out on my Radeon or the PVR-25?

If I had a DVD, would playing it off the HTPC have equal quality to playing it directly through a DVD player?

I've read that consolidated thread on Tuners, but it only had suggested tuners for each usage class. Are there any cheaper equivalents tot he PVR-250? What I would mainly use it for are recording only...since it's going to be used in an HTPC setup, I wouldn't be using actual TV Tuner functions, because the TV is already there. So most importantly to me are recording qualities, which is why I want a hardware encoder like the PVR-250. But if there are other cards out there that are cheaper, and meant for recording only (which I'm not aware of) that would be a preferable option.

Thanks in advance!

 

[weeber]

Hey Rhombus,

First, the PVR-250 does not have TV-out, the PVR-350 does however. In your case, I would stick with the TV-Out of the 8500. The ATI cards seem to have a pretty good TV-out.

Your second question about the DVD through HTPC is a little more complicated. You CAN make it look as good as a stand-alone player, but it can require quite a bit of effort to get all the color balance just right. I think there are cheaper equivalents to the PVR-250 (made by Avermedia perhaps?), but I would be careful with them as they're typically not as well supported. I can attest to the fact that the Hauppauge cards are great products

For your info I'm running an HTPC with a PVR-250, Athlon 900MHz, 256 Megs PC100, FX5200, and 40-gig hard drive. As you can tell, it's pretty much built out of spare parts, but I'm amazed at what it can do. I'm using Sage 2.0 for my frontend (software that provides the PVR capabilities and more). Recording is great an easy. In fact I just used it to record the 4 hours of the Farscape miniseries, cut the commercials, and then burned it to a Video DVD for posterity. I never had a Tivo, just a VCR that I used rarely, but this is an awesome setup for recording shows.

Finally, I'm going to give my typical recommendation with HTPC threads. I would go and visit HTPCnews.com and read the threads and reviews there. They're extremely helpful with all things HTPC.

 

[Rhombuss]

Thanks for the input, weeber, appreciate it!

I mainly looked at the Hauppauge card because everyone usually recommends the hardware encoder so the CPU utilization is skyrocketing. I'm also using spare parts for this HTPC, but is actually a P4 1.6A /w 512MB DDR400, 80GB HDD. So would going with a cheaper tuner (maybe the Leadtek cards) have comparable quality when recording? I really don't care much about other features, as long as recording is top quality. Like I said before, watching TV is no concern for me, since this will be used to play DVDs/music and record only.