If I had a fast system, and I had 4 WinTV PVR 350 installed. Could I record 4 shows at the same time using MPEG2?

How fast of a system could do this? I guess I should go with a RAID setup for some extra HD speed?

Thanks,

Tony

For SDTV You don't need a very fast system or 4 PVR-350 cards. The main difference from a 250 to a 350 is the video output . If you're looking to capture up to 4 streams at once and play back one you only need one of those per system. Since the PVR cards do hardware based encoding there's practically no CPU load, and any modern PATA or SATA HD with DMA enabled will handle the disk activity just fine. I think we've actually got someone around here who has five or six tuners in their box and has recorded using all of them at the same time.

Playing back 4 streams at once would be more challenging but I think an AMD 64 3000+ or P4 3Ghz would do it without even breaking a sweat. This is probably also about the only case where I'd recommend getting more than .5Gb of RAM for SDTV stuff.

Thanks for your reply.

If I went with 2 pvr-500's would that be sufficient to record 4 things at once?

I'm trying to set something up to record all 4 major networks news broadcasts.

Leaving aside the issue of why you'd want 4 350's (ie 4 TV outs as opposed to 150/250/500s), I'd guess that you could do this with any half decent PC (>= 1 GHz), based purely on my non-scientific obsevations of my PIII-866 recording from one 350.

You might run into problems however if you were to try and transcode and/or commflag at the same time. And if you were watching something which wasn't MPEG2 using the 350 TV out.

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HP VL400 (PIII 866), Skystar2 2.6D, PVR350, Nvidia FX5200, 384MB, 200GB, KnoppMyth R5.5

Yep. Assuming that you don't need to go through a cable box... That's when things get ugly for multiple feeds.

I think the guy with 6 tuners has 2 PVR-500s, a PVR-?50 and something else (maybe even an HDTV tuner).