Fx 5600 ultra and what TV card works?
 

HI,
I am running a Hyperthreading 2.4 P4 and a PNY FX 5600 ultra vid card
with two monitors and windows xp pro. Has anyone had a similar set up with
a PCI TV tuner card that worked well? It would seem that these things just
dont work to well together these days. I want to shedule TV recordings at
good to great quality. Then edit out the commercials and burn them to watch
later on VCD. The New ATI card sounds good, but I am hesitant to use ATI
with Nvidia Detonator drivers installed. NVIDIA states that in order to
utilize the Personal Cinema Drivers you need the cards designed with it
utilizing a proprietery interface. Oh Well. I have tried the MSI TV
@nywhere (before the hyperthreading fix) it sucked raw. The software
blew.... locked up constantly, every time. I salvaged an old STB TV PCI and
got it to work with DScaler, but the recording part is tuff. Demos dont
seem to work. That intervideo seems to realy suck. and nothing seems to
run where I can use it as a viewer and a recorder. Any advice would be
appreciated.
Thanks,
KY,

I wouldn't really worry about the brand of the card or the software they
come with. It all comes down to the tuner and the chipset. For years the
bt848/878 chipset has been pretty much the standard, (Prolink Pixelview,
Leadtek 2000XP, STB etc). Conexant has recently released a new chip the
CX23880 chip (MSI TV@nywhere, ASUS TV tuner) that looks like an improvement.
Pretty much all the programs that come with the cards are downright
pathetic. My Pixelview card, I wouldn't even put the CD in my drive the
contents are so bad. Many far better 3rd party programs exist with much
better capture capabilities. The ones i've had most luck with are
VirtualVCR, VirutalDub(Mod), PowerVCR, but analog capturing is really a bit
of an artform, and you've gotta get a handle on drivers, compression codecs,
audio sync etc.

My advice to you would be keep the STB card (for now), get the btwdmdrv
drivers http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/, you've already got DScaler for
watching TV, get VirtualDubMod for capturing. Seemed I had the best capture
results with VDubMod (least sync problems), using either the PicVideo MJPEG
codec or the hufyuv codec.

I stuck the fx5600 I had into roomies box when I went ATI 9800 pro and on
his system his old hauppage program and card works just fine. Actually
watched him use MiBao using the universal driver that comes with the fx
cards for capture and hes even doing on the fly compression and their coming
out great.

"Chimera" wrote in message
...
I wouldn't really worry about the brand of the card or the software they
come with. It all comes down to the tuner and the chipset. For years the
bt848/878 chipset has been pretty much the standard, (Prolink Pixelview,
Leadtek 2000XP, STB etc). Conexant has recently released a new chip the
CX23880 chip (MSI TV@nywhere, ASUS TV tuner) that looks like an
improvement.
Pretty much all the programs that come with the cards are downright
pathetic. My Pixelview card, I wouldn't even put the CD in my drive the
contents are so bad. Many far better 3rd party programs exist with much
better capture capabilities. The ones i've had most luck with are
VirtualVCR, VirutalDub(Mod), PowerVCR, but analog capturing is really a
bit
of an artform, and you've gotta get a handle on drivers, compression
codecs,
audio sync etc.

My advice to you would be keep the STB card (for now), get the btwdmdrv
drivers http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/, you've already got DScaler for
watching TV, get VirtualDubMod for capturing. Seemed I had the best
capture
results with VDubMod (least sync problems), using either the PicVideo
MJPEG
codec or the hufyuv codec.