Hd htpc

[Bling]

anyone ever heard of a real magick x-card? I want to know what purpose it has in comparison to a pvr-250. I was also wondering about proccesor power. Ive heard the fast proccesors are required for smooth dvd and hdtv interfaces. I was wondering if you copuld supplement proccesor speed with a hardware decoder. would that work out? and if it did what would be the required speed?

 

[CrimandEvil]

X- card is for a dedicated TVout, the jury is still out when it comes to quality versus video card TVout but everyone agrees that the software sucks, too bad to since you need their software for the card to work (there might be a work around for it mow though, I don't really follow dev on the card). There aren't a whole lot of hardware based HDTV encoders, personally I'd just skip it right now since you're going to have a hell of a time just trying to record OTA broadcasts much less QAM.

I was wondering if you copuld supplement proccesor speed with a hardware decoder. would that work out? and if it did what would be the required speed?

Thats why you use a hardware based encoder like the 250 but playback is going to be different. You can use a 250 on a 1gig VIA Epia board (which is like a 500mhz P3) so for playback and all I'd say anything above 1 GHZ (P3 or Athlon) is good too go. I know that a 800mhz Athlon and a 250 can do it fine but drops frames during playback like hell.
Heres a review of the Xcard