Opinoins on WinTV PVR-350 / 250?

[VT-Vincent]

I'm currently looking for a decent video capture card for my system and I'd like to know what kind of experiences anyone has had using the WinTV PVR cards. After looking around a lot, and using a few cards first-hand, it looks like a very promising product.

Prior to this card, I had an ATI TV-Wonder Pro Remote Control edition, and I'm sorry to say that it was a horrible experience. First, it wasn't compatible with my HyperThreaded P4, so I had to spend 3 hours obtaining an experimental patch from Microsoft. Second, the video was about 2 seconds out of sync with the audio (using audio pass-through, not the actual tuner). And finally, their software... which I don't even want to get started on.

Aside from my frustration with the product, the only real problem that remained was the fact that the audio and video were out of sync. I'm guessing this was due to the fact it just passed audio through to the Line-In on the sound card. Does anyone know if the WinTV PVRs have a better way of handling the audio, a way that would actually keep it synchronized with the video?

Thank you for your help!

 

[SJetski71]

I borrowed a friends pvr 250 and have yet to install it but from what i understand the hauppage 250/350 are considered the best in class by a mile. They perform hardware mpeg2 encoding which is not found on the cheaper cards (read; Leadtek). Don't take my word for it, check out what the pro's @ AVS Forums have to say about it.