best video card

[Wheemer]

Well the plugin is a work in progress, so I would imagine eventually it will support divx/xvid and dvd playback. Have a look at the xcard thread http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ead.php?t=9356

There's nothing that'll beat the quality for a SDTV.

[aoehlke]

ok, i read that whole thread... thanks for the link.
BUT, i see some red flags with the xcard and my setup.
1) i am using a 32" crt tv for output
2) i had hoped to have the transparent menus and tv showing in background with sage tv live tv... am i right in saying this wont work with a xcard? due to the 256 color issue?

3) i plan to mostly use the live tv with epg and record pause... etc... basically tivo.
i will watch dvds on my dvd player... not my pc... is the xcard still my best option... i see that pricewise, its much less then me upgrading to a 6600.

4) how stable is the xcard and the sage plugin? i see the poor guy who was workin on it was getting tired and stumped a lot... people should really donate 10$ each to the poor guy via paypal... hobby or not, i know how long he must have spent coding. plus me may be mroe inclined to maintain it... better still when will sage supprt the xcard directly?

[aoehlke]

also, i just read the xcard is having some "mpeg issues"... what are these?
for 100$, i guess its worth a shot

[Wheemer]

Where in canada can you find it for 100 bucks?

Sorry can't help with details... post a few question in the xcard thread to get their attention.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by aoehlke

BUT, i see some red flags with the xcard and my setup.
1) i am using a 32" crt tv for output
2) i had hoped to have the transparent menus and tv showing in background with sage tv live tv... am i right in saying this wont work with a xcard? due to the 256 color issue?

It converts the UI to 256 colors, but it does so while retaining partial transparency.

3) i plan to mostly use the live tv with epg and record pause... etc... basically tivo.
i will watch dvds on my dvd player... not my pc... is the xcard still my best option... i see that pricewise, its much less then me upgrading to a 6600.

I use the xcard for TV viewing via SageTV and DVD viewing via the Xcard's DVD player, and use some Nvidia video card for using the computer w/a monitor for other things (sometimes at the same time). I think the Xcard is great for what it does: hardware decoding w/practically no cpu hit. But, I have never used a video card for TV viewing (SD or anything else), so I can't compare that. The video card would be more versatile in terms of what gets displayed on your TV, but I have no need for anything beyond displaying video on my TV. I guess you'll have to decide what you want a card to do & whether an Xcard or a video card fits your needs better.

4) how stable is the xcard and the sage plugin?

For me, the xcard has been extremely stable, used with or w/o the plugin. I know some people have had problems with the plugin, but I don't know if they had problems before using the plugin. As Tom says: the plugin is alpha, so it has a ways to go yet. If you don't use the plugin, recordings will still play, but you would get no UI on the TV.

- Andy

[aoehlke]

if i use the xcard to display live tv, that would be coming into the PC via pvr150, would i still be usign sage tv and the EPG etc? or would i be using xcard software?
i'm a bit confused as to how this works i guess...the pvr 150 must grab the signal and encode on the fly... then the xcard but take this digitized signal and decode back to analog... and stick the sage epg etc etc overtop via overlay of some sort.

how could i tell the xcard to display not only the video, but also the sage tv?

[Opus4]

Except for the fact that the Xcard is decoding in hardware & a video card is decoding in software (+perhaps hardware assist), it all works pretty much the same in terms of the results: The encoder records whatever SageTV tells it to. SageTV then displays the UI and perhaps plays a video on your output card.

With the Xcard plugin, everything is still done inside SageTV, except that SageTV uses the plugin to handle video playback & UI display on the TV. The user interacts with SageTV, not the plugin.

When using the Xcard w/o the alpha Xcard plugin, the video goes through the Xcard & the UI goes to your monitor via the video card. You will have NO menus on the TV & must look at the monitor to interact with the UI.

With or w/o the plugin, the UI portion will still be displayed on the video card/monitor. But, I just leave SageTV sleeping in the system tray, so it doesn't even show anything on the monitor as I use it on the TV. The only problem occurs if one of my kids is playing one of their learning games that has sound... it sort of interferes with watching TV at the same time. I gave up on playing some recorded rock music concert when it had a competing kid's game elevator music soundtrack trying to play a duet.

- Andy

[aoehlke]

"Where in canada can you find it (xcard) for 100 bucks?"

sorry, it comes to 130$ canadian shipped from provantage.com in the USA.
based on todays exchange rate, 105 USD = 130$ canadian.

the shipping alone is 25$ US.... and the card retails for 80$ on their site.
I've just ordered mine. they have 56 in stock as of this morning.

I also decided to be a real weenie, and get both an xcard and a nvidia 6600.(after reading so many reviews of the 6600, whether i use it for sage or not, it will be a ncie replacement for my radeon 9600 for games etc... the MSI branded AGP model seems to be the quietest one i can get it for 300$ canadian.

[Wheemer]

I hope duty isn't a killer on that xcard. If it's shipped UPS it'll be a lot.

Good decision though... Some way or another you'll get a great picture from Sage.

Were in Canada are you? I've seen a few different vans down by the river...

[jptaz]

You won't regret your XCard Decision.

I have been using it this weekend since I got tired of the hiccups in the latest Version of SageTV. Previous versions did not have as many problems with playing back using Intervideo Decoders. I can not even set the disk buffer size to 32 MB any more because after a fast forward or rewind it goes really slow for 3 seconds or so before playing normallyagain and during that time the CPU is really high.

Frankly the XCard Video Playback is beautiful on my 32" HDTV running at 1080i. The OSD is pretty slow since it has to scale up to that high a resolution, but it is worth it for stable smooth playback. It looks way better than via my DVI connection.

John

[aoehlke]

I'm in ottawa Wheemer.
I didn't notice what shipper provantage uses, DHL maybe?

as far as duty... sometimes in my experience, stuff gets through, other times it doesnt.
by that I mean, sometimes i pay duty on things, sometimes I dont.
doesnt seem to matter how it comes, USPS, UPS, fedex.
doesnt seem to matter what it is either.

so I'll take chances... I've avoided duty on enough items now that if I have to pay on one, its no biggie.

I did find a dealer in canada, markham ontario, with xcards in stock.
he wanted 129$ for the card + tax, and 12$ shipping.

the website is: www.bernclare.com
no pricing on their site, but an email reply I got stated this:

The Sigma X-card is in stock. For quantity of 1-2, it is
CDN$129per + taxes. Shipping is about CDN$12.00


Regards,

BernClare Multimedia Inc.
www.bernclare.com
Tel: (905) 513-2722
Fax: (905) 513-7311

a bit pricey perhaps... unless you live in markham. and can save 12 bones on the shipping. I would expect that if you went in store you could talk the guy into letting it go no tax perhaps... i dont think he's selling piles of them.

so there ya go!
cheers