PVR Software+Hardware

[toin7]

What do you guys reccommend for the best video quality for SDTV hardware encoder card? From what I'm reading the ATI 650 series has the best video quality.

For the software, I like SageTV but it has a lot of stuff I don't need. I'm not looking for front end software, just something that can record both by time and show, commercial skip, fast forward(optional), replay, watch live tv even if it's recording, watch one show while recording another, program guide, and hopefully DivX/Xvid encoding instead of mpeg2.

Sorry if any of these questions have been answered millions of times.

 

[Asgorath]

What do you guys reccommend for the best video quality for SDTV hardware encoder card? From what I'm reading the ATI 650 series has the best video quality.

For the software, I like SageTV but it has a lot of stuff I don't need. I'm not looking for front end software, just something that can record both by time and show, commercial skip, fast forward(optional), replay, watch live tv even if it's recording, watch one show while recording another, program guide, and hopefully DivX/Xvid encoding instead of mpeg2.

Sorry if any of these questions have been answered millions of times.

Just FYI...most cards do hardware MPEG2 encoding. Then afterward you transcode to MPEG4 (divx/xvid).

I'm a linux guy, so hauppauge pvr-500 for me, but I know there are higher quality encoders out there.

 

[CrimandEvil]

Honestly, this has been covered to death before, just looking back through this section of the forum and you'll find several threads talking about this.

Anyways, the best out there is going to be ATI's 650 but I wouldn't suggest going with it unless you actually have too (if you want to tune only HD in MCE it's the best card for that).

After that is going to be ATI's 550 based tuners, Avermedia's Purity 250 tuner, NV's DualTV, Saber's VistaView 20/20 and then the PVR150/500 tuners.