What are the differences between these cards? Is the 250 worth the $50 price difference?

Thanks

Someone please correct meif I am wrong, but I think the older PVR 150 did not have the MPEG-2 encoder. I just bought a 150 and set my box up a couple of days ago. The PVR 150 seems to be working great so far. Working on getting the remote going. Here is a matrix for the PVR cards if that helps. http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/compare_pvr.html

Mike

There was no older PVR-150 from Huappauge. The current one, like all of their PVR cards, has an MPEG-2 encoder. See the Wiki for a summary of differences. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=TVCards

For more details you'll have to spelunk through Hauppauge's web pages. I think you lose MPEG-1 encoding (who cares) and some of the oddball capture resolutions and bit rates.

(corrected a typo)

thanks a lot for the replys

If I remember from when I was researching it a bit more in depth....the 150 is the latest/greatest. Its cheaper because it uses a single chip where the 250 used 2. The 250 has 1 chip for A/D and 1 for encoding...while the 150 combines both operations into 1 chip.

I dont know if its any better or worse. I was looking at building a Win based Media PC quite a while back when the 150 had just come out. Alot of people were saying to stay away from them at that time because of driver issues or whatever. But they seem to be working great now from everything I have read.

Beware there are several different 150's that you can end up with depending on which box (product #) you buy.

For instance, I purchased 150 MCE KIT at Best Buy and it is made to upgrade/OEM Windows XP 2005 MCE machines. It comes with a USB remote with the little Windows Button. The card doesn't have FM input whereas other 150's do. I didn't realize this until I opened the box (not that I listen to FM on my computer anyway).

@mmaki - I couldn't get the USB remote working. I'm sure there are ways to make it work using USBMCE but there isn't a tutorial dumbed down enough for me to understand exactly what to do to get it working. I do have a ATI all in wonder card with the Remote Wonder usb/rf remote and it was detected by A26 on install!

I'm wondering if I should swap this card with a 350 which has a hardware mpeg decoder. I'd like to have a 2 tuner system that can do any combination of recording shows/playing back shows on cheap [older/slower] hardware.