I was able to acquire a PVR250 over the weekend. I have been running KnoppMyth on a Leadtek TV2000 for 6 months or so without and problems. I had the card tuned to where the picture quality was pretty good. It was not as good as live TV - the whites were also a little washed out. I had read a lot of posts about how people have quality on par or better than live tv - I could never get there.

That all changed when I put the PVR250 into the box. I had no idea what I was missing. I now have a picture that mirrors my live TV input. In fact, I like the picture better than my direct tv picture. I highly recommend the PVR250. Well worth the upgrade!

What puzzles me is the mirid of options. The different TV recording streams, bitrates etc. I tried playing a little with resolution, bitrates, and streams - but was not able to tell much of a difference. Does anyone have any advice on what is good for live tv and for recording? I think for live tv I have my stream as DVD and the bitrates like 6K to 8K. The resolution is 740x480. For high quality I have the resolution the same, but use the default stream type. I get about 1.5g for 30 minutes. I tried searching the mailing list to see what people said about the different streams etc, but did not find to many that offered good details.

Finally - Thanks Cecil and Dale for such an amazing distribution. I literally installed the PVR250 next to the TV2000 rebooted, went through the card config (actually removed the setup for the TV2000 and setup the PVR as the main card - only have only cable line to use right now), rebooted and I was watching live tv through myth without any hiccups. The only change I had to make was commenting out the lirc stuff in the ivtv file so the system would use the lirc stuff for the TV2000 - I already had that remote configured. AWESOME job.

I ordered my pvr-250 from newegg and I am anticipating its arrival on 5/14.

I am looking forward to the upgrade in TV quality.

I too have a Winfast 2000 as well and will keep that card installed as a secondary tuner.

Mike G.

Mike - definitly worth it. I like my TV2000. I left it in the box. In fact, the remote on the TV2000 is way better IMO. That is the only thing I had to modify when it rebooted. I had to comment out the PVR250 remote lirc lines and reboot. Of course, when it ran setup I selected yes to clearing the card setup and no to the channel setup. The card you setup first is your default - might want to make the 250 your default card. I know in 0.15 you can select cards for each recording - at least that is what I read. Good luck!

Quigs

Did you find anything out about this?

I have been using a PVR-150 for the past few months with the settings at 720x480, Stream Type=DVD, and bitrates 4500 to 8000. The recording quality with these settings is great, but I am wondering if this is overkill or not (wasting disk space???).

I am recording a program tonight with the bitrates cut in half. I'll let you know how it goes, but I wanted to see if anyone has done some experiments they would like to share. I have seen lots of comments that standard def recordings should only be around 1.5GB/hour, but these settings produce around 3GB/hour.

Using the defaults my recordings are very consistently at ~2.2Gb/hour. Anything over the default 480x480 is probably overkill since the resulting recordings already show more of the image than my TV does...

BTW - The quaility is very good, as I proved to myself by burning a DVD and playing back with a "real" DVD player. For most people getting the TV-Out from their video card tuned will be the bigger hurdle...

note that while recording at anything over 480x480 may be overkill some "real" dvd players can't handle 480x480, and need a resolution from the dvd spec like 720x480, Though the file size at 480x480 and 720x480 using the same defaults will be identical unless you change the bitrates.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

True, but I've never had a problem with a DVD player refusing to play a 480x480 recording. Mine is just a relatively cheap low end Panasonic, under $70 even at a brick and mortar store. I've burned DVD's for 3-4 other people with different players and none of them have had problems either. Of course these really aren't standards compliant DVDs, so YMMV.

As for the bit rate and file size, again true, but it also means that you're using a third of your bit budget for parts of the image that you can't generally see.

As the old story goes - "Ya pays your money, and ya takes your choices."

Thanks for the feedback.

I changed my settings months ago when I first set up the box. What are the defaults?

480x480 and bitrates are 4500, 6000 max.

So I recorded Stargate Atlantis at 720x480, DVD and 3500,4100.

With my other settings, I usually get about 3.1GB/hr. With these new settings, I got 1.8GB/hr and I couldn't really detect any difference in the quality.

Re: 480x480 resolution. The DVD FAQ states that, by the book:



http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.4

So I usually use 352x480 for everyday recording, and 720x480 for anything I need higher quality on (if you can call anything recorded off of analog cable "high quality.")