 aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA
 ·Verizon FiOS
4 edits | reply to b10010011
Re: Does anyone use these? said by b10010011:said by fifty nine:That's changing. It used to be that you could only get a Cablecard tuner as part of a whole new PC from HP and others. Now Cablelabs loosened the restrictions so that you can pop a cablecard tuner into any old PC. Sure but do the math. four-tuner version of the card somewhere between $300 and $600. (so lets say $200-$300 for a two tuner version) A PC powerful enough to record two HD streams while playing back an HD recording is going to be in the $1000+ range as none of these cards have hardware encoders for HD recording. A TiVo-HD with lifetime subscription is about $700 and even less if you catch a sale. No encoding is necessary. the HD stream is just recorded as is. You only need to decode it when watching. A very cheap dual core has no problem recording multiple streams. An HD stream is very slow. at most 19mbs and a USB 5400 rpm drive can do that.
I was recording and watching HD programing in 2001 with a P3 . A few years ago I had a cheap dual core with two USB tuners and a USB storage drive. It had zero problems recording two HD programs, watching a program on that PC and sending two programs to two other PCs on my gigabit network. All concurrently.
And this is with all the content being read and written to/from the same USB drive and this was a few years ago. A current cheap PC should have no problems if my cheap PC from a few years ago could do it. |
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b10010011Whats a Posting tag?
join:2004-09-07
Bellingham, WA Reviews:
 ·Comcast Formerl..
| said by aaronwt: I was recording and watching HD programing in 2001 with a P3 . A few years ago I had a cheap dual core with two USB tuners and a USB storage drive. It had zero problems recording two HD programs, watching a program on that PC and sending two programs to two other PCs on my gigabit network. All concurrently. And this is with all the content being read and written to/from the same USB drive and this was a few years ago. A current cheap PC should have no problems if my cheap PC from a few years ago could do it. I would like to see that. I have a Hauppauge PCIe HD tuner card and my dual core AMD 4800+ has trouble even displaying an HD channel without frequent pauses. Recording even one HD channels is impossible and I have a fast SATA drive. |
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openbox9
join:2004-01-26
Alexandria, VA
kudos:2 | You have a problem with your computer/software then. I have no problem recording two simultaneous 1080i streams from OTA with my 1.6GHz G4 PowerBook. I definitely can't watch them on the machine, but I have no problem recording. As aaronwt  stated, there's no encoding and your tuner card and computer should just drop the MPEG2 files to your hard drive. |
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aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA Reviews:
·Verizon FiOS
| reply to b10010011
said by b10010011:said by aaronwt: I was recording and watching HD programing in 2001 with a P3 . A few years ago I had a cheap dual core with two USB tuners and a USB storage drive. It had zero problems recording two HD programs, watching a program on that PC and sending two programs to two other PCs on my gigabit network. All concurrently. And this is with all the content being read and written to/from the same USB drive and this was a few years ago. A current cheap PC should have no problems if my cheap PC from a few years ago could do it. I would like to see that. I have a Hauppauge PCIe HD tuner card and my dual core AMD 4800+ has trouble even displaying an HD channel without frequent pauses. Recording even one HD channels is impossible and I have a fast SATA drive. Something must be wrong with your system. The hard drive will not be the bottle neck since a 5400 rpm drive is more than fast enough. And I was running two HD tuners off USB with no hiccups.
I've run my tuners on other systems I own with no problems either. All on systems I had built a few years ago. I haven't used my Cat's Eye tuners in while now since I have a bunch of TiVos to use instead. |
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