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Turning the PC into a Digital Video Recorder

Posted by michael on from the some-assembly-required dept.

gearfix2 writes "The NYTimes ran this story in today's paper about how to turn the PC into a personal video recorder (a la TiVo)... It's got pretty thorough coverage of PC-based hardware with the conclusion "the TiVo outshines the PC-based systems by being easier to use and by offering more built-in intelligence." Conspicuously absent are El Gato's EyeTV for the mac and SnapStream's Personal Video Station... Anyways, the real question is whether PC PVR will *ever* get there. No one does it quite right yet..."

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Me? by Tall+Rob+Mc · · Score: 1, Troll
    I've been testing six of these systems on my Compaq Presario 7000, running Windows Me: the I/OMagic PC PVR ($50), the AVerTV Studio ($90), the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 ($149), the Pinnacle Bungee DVD ($199), the ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV ($249) and the Nvidia Personal Cinema ($299).
    I can only be impressed to a certain point if he's using Me for anything.
  2. Picture Quality Sucks (and Blows) by D.+Book · · Score: 1, Troll

    I tried my best to get into using my PC as a PVR, excited about the idea of chopping out the bits I don't want (ads, etc.) and having all the recorded programs sorted in directories by name instead of sprawled across VHS tapes.

    After around six months of experimentation with my All-in-Wonder Radeon and a copy of ShowShifter (which was better than ATI's TV software), there was one thing I could not escape -- the picture quality just looked bad. Whether I maximized the TV display on the PC or output the video (either via composite or s-video) to my 34cm or 68cm TV, the quality was simply YUCK. Very soft, poor colour reproduction, and pathetic bleeding of bright parts of the image (which I clearly see demonstrated in screenshots of other TV card reviews). And this was before I compressed anything. Whenever I tried out DVD on my PC, outputting to a TV, the result was also poor -- an soft image clearly inferior to my standalone DVD player.

    All in all, my VHS tapes were easily superior to anything my PC and ALL-in-Wonder could spit out.