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TiVO on your PC?


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Does anyone know of a program that gives you the basic features of TiVO for a tv tuner card? All im really looking for is something that let's me pause tv like tivo does, and then resume it later. All I have found so far are programs the capture movies and images but I would like something that let's me simply pause and them resume later on. Anyone heard of such a thing for the pc?

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Thats called PVR or DVR (for personal or digital video recording) and yes there are quite a few programs that do that.

PowerVCR 2 (from the makers of PowerDVD) and WinDVR 2 (from the makers of WinDVD) are just 2 that I can name.

In my limited experience I have heard that software + tv tuner card does not work as well as a hardware PVR card. It seems the speed needed to transfer that much uncompressed video across the PCI bus and to the program and then hard drive, is taxing for even the fastest systems. Even many people with fast processors are finding their hard drives, PCI bus or other componants to slow to keep up with realtime. Others say that they can do it but it brings their PC to a crawl and/or they can't do anything else on the system while in TV pause mode or it will make the video drop frames (even surfing the net or e-mail!). Weather or not this is a problem for all who use software PVR I dont know because I dont use software PVR myself.

Another road you can go is to get a hardware PVR card. This is what I chose to do and am happy so far with my desicion. Hardware is much less taxing on your system than software and it is becoming cheaper and cheaper everyday. I just got a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 from CompUSA for $99 last week ($150 - $50 mail-in rebate). It seems the rebate offer has expired but Im sure they will offer more soon somewhere. As I type this I am pausing live TV and my processor power is at ~%10 (and mind you I have a Celeron 550!!!) What I like about my card is it takes in the video stream from a source (CATV/S-Video/RCA) and compresses it into MPEG-2 in realtime on the card AND THEN sends it out to the hard drive to buffer for playback. AS you could imagine the compression is excelent (both in visual quality and in size reduction). The size reduction makes it, not only possible, but easy for my PCI bus to transfer the data and easy for my hard drive to write the data to disk... also I can do other things at the same time as the tv is on/paused. This is not too say the card is perfect, it has some flaws too. The card only has hardware encoding of MPEG1/MPEG2 it must decode in software. But if I understand right, decoding is less CPU intensive than encoding anyway. My Celery 550 seems to have no problem playing back video although it does slow everything else down noticably... but hey its a Celeron (in fact its one of those famous Celeron 366 oc'ed to 550 still running strong for the third year in a row. ;)) Another flaw seems to be that while this is an outstanding piece of hardware, it is controlled by Hauppauge's crappy software (I call it ATi driver syndrome :)) And the bad thing about that is that none of those 3rd party programs I mentioned yet support this card because it doesn't use the standard chipsets that most regular TV cards do. But there are already other owners of WinTV PVR's who are talking about making open source drivers and players for this card. And as more people get them more players will start supporting them.

The truth is... for now TiVo is probably the best solution out there, because it is a dedicated box running a highly tweaked version of linux, and will never have to worry about someon using it to check for e-mail while its recording.

Wow what a long post that turned out to be. Oh well I better get back to The Screen Savers on TechTV. It's already 45 min into the show and I'm just about to start watching from the beginning. ;)

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