On Feb 6, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Erik Mouw wrote: > On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 10:04:56AM -0500, Jeff Simpson wrote: > >> So in summary, the PVR-350 *does* work, it just isn't as fully >> supported as say, any nvidia or ati tv out card made in the last 5 >> years for 1/4 of the cost. The video encoding is well supported, just >> like the 150/250/500, it's just the output that's flaky. In my own >> personal opinion, having owned a PVR-350, I would say that I'd be >> better off owning a 150 and an nvidia geforce card with TV Out. > > I diagree. A PVR 150 is about 85 EUR, for 140 EUR you have a 350. That > difference does buy you a ati or nvidia card with tv out (cheapest is > around 40 EUR), but doesn't buy you a CPU fast enough to do the > decoding, especially when you have some old hardware lying around.
I absolutely agree with Erik's comments, both those above and what I haven't quoted. I'd like to add a couple of things. First, I did have an nVidia card, originally. On a slow system this means enabling XvMC, which "works" -- but in my experience it behaved even worse than how Jeff described the PVR-350. Stuttering on simple jump back/forward operations was common, and would sometimes cause X to hang. Fast forward and rewind were painfully slow to respond. I eventually gave up and returned the card. However, I kept the power supply needed to accomodate the video card. This was a significant hidden cost! Second, though there's significant overscan on the PVR-350, the color saturation is unquestionably superior to the nVidia card I had. It wasn't even a fair comparison, really. For that reason alone I have stuck with using the 350 in my frontend, and will continue to do so until I'm forced to do otherwise. --scott _______________________________________________ ivtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://ivtvdriver.org/mailman/listinfo/ivtv-users
