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| Audio/Visual - Standard and HD Discussions about audio and visual equipment, media and content for both standard and HD |
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16-06-2006, 04:18 PM
| #1 (permalink) |
| Registered+ Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Cornwall
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| Anyone else using a DVR setup? Does anyone else have a dedicated PVR/DVR HTPC? They seem to be gaining in popularity as of late - can't say I blame anyone, either, they're handy little things. I've had mine for about six weeks now, and (aside from a few teething problems) it seems to do the job just fine. Specs:
According to MCE it has a capacity of 30 hours for recording, give or take. Which does me just fine. My only complaint is the silly Radeon DVD decoders. According to MCE, they're out of date and need to be upgraded before I can watch DVDs using the built-in MCE DVD player. However, I can't access the latest decoder upgrade package from ATI, because the installation utility can't verify my driver CD. Probably because it's an older model. I don't see why MCE would make such a fuss when DVDs play fine with PowerDVD. Odd. Anyway, anyone else care to share their setup?  |
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16-06-2006, 07:42 PM
| #2 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Northampton
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| Yeah that sounds a bit weird, I have a Nvidia 6200 AGP card on my setup. I use the Nvidia PureVideo MPEG2 Decoder which work quite nicely. I noticed slight improvement in picture quality over the powerdvd decoder. Didn't have any problems playing dvd's with only the powerdvd decoder. At the moment I'm running:
The problems I have are with the display setup since my TV can only support 480p or 576p. At the progressive resolutions I get too much overscan so I am using a 576i resolution and have just got 2 one inch black bars running on the top and bottom. Not perfect but the picture quality is miles better than through S-Video or Composite. |
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16-06-2006, 11:31 PM
| #3 (permalink) |
| Registered+ Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Cornwall
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| Nice system you have there. Yeah, initially I had some issues getting the resolution for my HDTV set up, by default it cut the picture in half - nothing a bit of tweaking in Catalyst CC couldn't fix, though. I did look at an older nVidia card instead of an ATI when I was planning it (the SP13000 can only support two PCI cards, no AGP), however I read on various websites that Radeons performed better with the TV tuner in question. A bit of digging also turned up results that indicates that the PowerDVD decoder and the new ATI decoder are one and the same. Hence why ATI requires the installation CD be verified; they can't give away commercial software unless you own ATI hardware. Doesn't look like I'll be getting MCE DVD support anytime soon then. Oh well. |
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19-06-2006, 06:05 PM
| #4 (permalink) |
| Senior Member Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: London, UK
Posts: 704
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| Originally Posted by Rookie Hi
How's the FusionHDTV dual tuner card? I want a dual tuner one, PCI Express ideally, I'm just surprised there's so few options... DM |
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22-06-2006, 01:20 PM
| #5 (permalink) |
| Registered+ Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Cornwall
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| I've had no problems with it whatsoever - picture quality is good (even though it uses a software encoder/decoder), recording performance is decent - the only problem I've found is that the software that comes with it doesn't take advantage of the dual tuners. (Well, if it does then I haven't found an option pertaining to it.) Both the tuners show up and work fine in MCE2005, though. |
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22-06-2006, 01:28 PM
| #6 (permalink) |
| Hater of Cheap ISPS  Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: M28, Manchester
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| Yeap - I'm running a HTPC which also doubles up as my SLI gaming rig which is in my system specifications over under my name etc  The only real thing I can complain about is the lack of updates for several things, but the main one has to be the nvidia drivers for MCE2005. A quick look at the nvidia website shows the latest driver update for the graphics platform was released on February 7, 2006. TV Tuner-wise I've got the hauppauge Nova-T which has been great and the picture quality superb. VLC360 & Transcode360 are also installed so I can watch DivX and Xvid files on the xbox 360 downstairs as well ( when it's connected to the network that is ) ---- Why do Computer Scientists get Halloween and Christmas mixed up? Because Oct. 31 = Dec. 25. |
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