VERY dumb hauppauge 1600 question

[obrian93]

As always, apologies in advance if this is in a sticky somewhere. That said, pleas spell it out for me, since I'm just not seeing the answer anywhere obvious.

The HVR-1600 uses the hardware mpg2 enco for NTSC, just like my little 150 has been trucking along with all these years. But in the fine print of the Hauppauge page for the 1600 it says:
"ATSC TV recordings are not 100% compatible with DVD"

So is it passing ATSC/ClearQAM straight to the disk? Will my stinky little Celeron handle that? Can I force-feed ATSC through the hw encoder?

Please note that I'm mostly excited about buttery smooth local DTV that Comcast is carrying. The whole house is still NTSC, so I'm not so worried about HD just yet. I was also so focused on cablecard systems that clearQAM seems to have arrived and taken root without me noticing at all.

Thanks!

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by obrian93

The HVR-1600 uses the hardware mpg2 enco for NTSC, just like my little 150 has been trucking along with all these years. But in the fine print of the Hauppauge page for the 1600 it says:
"ATSC TV recordings are not 100% compatible with DVD"

That is because the DVD spec only supports up to 720×480 (480i), and ATSC can be 480i, 480p, 720p or 1080i.

So is it passing ATSC/ClearQAM straight to the disk? Will my stinky little Celeron handle that? Can I force-feed ATSC through the hw encoder?

Yup, is its just dumpting the stream straight to disk. There is no encoding happening during the dump, so your Celeron should be able to handle that, as long as your hard drive is up to the task, it should be.

Now, if your Celeron can display the new HD recordings is a different story. The normal rule of thumb is that you need a 3Ghz system to display HD, but if you have a good video card and a good hardware-assisted codec, then much of the work gets offloaded to the video card, and you may be able to get awya with a less powerfull system. If the Celeron can't hang, then hopefully the HD extender will be out soon and you could use that.

[obrian93]

EXCELLENT. Thanks a ton, Jack. That makes perfect sense.

I'll fiddle around with the settings and see if the hauppauge card can give me a boost with playback (#1 selling point for me was the ability to be stingy with the system specs).