I am geting reay to order my parts.

I am a little confused about the tuner cards. I would like to use 2x Houppage 401.
Do the 401s have onboard coding? and if not is this going to overload my chosen processor ig both cards are simultaniosly recording?

Athenatech Micro ATX Case with 200W Power Supply, Model "A100BB"

SONY Beige 52x32x52 IDE Internal CD-RW Drive, Model CRX230E,

AMD Athlon XP 2400+ "Thorton", 266MHz FSB, 256K L2 Cache Processor



Seagate 120GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive, Model ST3120026A,

2 x Kingston ValueRAM 184 Pin 256MB DDR PC-2700

CHAINTECH nForce2 IGP Chipset Motherboard for AMD Socket A CPU, Model "7NIF2"

2 x Hauppauge PCI TV/FM Tuner Card, Model "WinTV-dbx(WINTV401)"

Those cards are software only, your processor should have no problems recording two streams at once.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Can't someone please elaborate on his question about the tuner card. I have been searching the forum to find out why everyone seems to have a PVR/250 or 350 when you can get two 401's and thus record two streams. Do the 401's take up too much CPU time? Is the 350 worth how much extra it costs? The only differance I can see between them all is the 401 simply captures streams and loads the CPU, the 250 captures and encodes MPEG 1/2 in hardware, and the 350 encodes and decodes MPEG 1/2. Is a fast CPU enough or is one of the PVR really better and thus worth it? Thanks very much for your response.

Johnnybastard

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You are probably fat.

well as far as the encoding/decoding you understand everything correctly. recording a stream on my sofware card uses 30-50% cpu on my 1700+ while recording a stream using my pvr250 uses 2-3% cpu. Most people say the picture is a bit sharper on the pvr cards as well. The other issue is sound. the hardware cards mux the sound in to the stream in hardware and don't require a patch cable to the soundcard, whereas most software cards do. the 401's I believe support btaudio, so you can use more than one with only one sound card, but most software cards don't support btaudio, and you have to have a sound card for each tvcard.

Using multiple 401 cards does require two discrete audio imputs, and at the moment that is best solved with btaudio. If you are using a capture card that does not support btaudio, you need a system that can simultaniously capture two audio streams and hand them to the system as discreet imputs to be stored with the video capture. The most cost effective way to do that is with two low end sound cards. I believe there was a thread around here where someone provided information on how to get this to work. I was never able to do so succesfully when I tried, so I can not provide a good example.

If you have the money for a higher end card, with multiple audio imputs that can be tied to discreet streams, you may be able to use that as a solution, though I don't know of anyone who has done that and reported it to work here.

-Rusty

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Master:
- AMD 1800XP on a MSI KT4V motherboard, via KT400 bios
- 120 G Segate Baracuda /, /cache, /myth, swap
- 200 G Segate Baracuda /myth/tv
- 3 Haupauge! WinTV PVR250s
- 19" Daewoo Monitor (1280x1024 ni)