Posted by Bill Vermillion on 02/13/06 03:35

In article <43ef8a3d_3@newsfeed.slurp.net>,
Bill's News <BillsNews@pcmagic.net> wrote:
>Bill Vermillion wrote:
>> In article <r40su11j4nrlpa2ab5sb2p89bdpf2vbj5m@4ax.com>,
>> <Harry@no.spam> wrote:
>>> Hi,

>>> The club I work in has full contact boxing type fights once
>>> in a while, and we have three camera positions recording
>>> them. We want to have instant reply type capability, but
>>> all that looks too expensive. Are there any resonably
>>> inexpensive ways of doing it?

>> Since you have 3 cameras it makes things a bit more of a challenge.

>> Reading the specs on the Hauppauge 500 series card - which has two
>> tuners - it also indicates it has headers for two A/V inputs. You
>> can put several of these cards into a PC for direct recording to a
>> hard drive.

>> So two cards should be able to give you 4 A/V inputs. WIth
>> a decent sized hard drives you'd be able to record the video
>> continually from all three cameras.

>> However I do not know if the system will support replay from the
>> channel you are recording while you are recording to give you the
>> instant replay effect.

>The brief description says:
>"... full PVR capabilities. Pause live TV, replay and skip forward,
>all while your other TV show continues to be recorded to your PC's
>hard disk ." Poorly written - but basically the same words used for
>the single tuner PVR products.

>I get the feeling, from the product description, that Hauppauge is
>providing no software for the 500 - rather, they are claiming it only
>runs under one of the 3rd party media software packages - specifically
>MSXPMC.

You might want to look at http://www.snapstream.com to see
what they do with their SW and Haugpaugge cards.

Their "Medusa" has three 500s so you can record six tv streams
simultaneously.

>Also, I happen to have both H250 and USB2 capture devices - when I
>plug the USB2 into the system with the H250 installed, the Win2KTV app
>only sees the USB2. But I don't know whether it only sees the "last
>device" installed - or searches for USB before internal. There is no
>way that I can find in the capture program to select a device.

I personally would avoid USB for anything with video and stick with
the PCI - or for external things like my video encoder from Canopus
- firewire.

>Whether the 3rd party apps can "see" more than one dual-tuner 500 is
>debatable;-)

As above Snapstream sells a package with 3. And if your browse
around you'll find one with 5 that will record 10 streams. They do
note that if you have multiple tuners they must have hardware MPEG
recording. Their Beyond TV SW shows about a dozen different brands
of cards they support, both analog and digital.

I'm still looking at them and others to see what I want to assemble
for my on PVR.

>At worst, however, using the 500 would then require only 2 pcs and
>some way of selecting which replay video is to be projected.

From what I can see it would take one card and one PC, or two cards
and one PC.

> If this is the case, then 2 HDD dual tuner PVR recorders (the
>analog, digital, HDTV Motorola for example - which can playback
>from either input stream or a pre-recorded stream while recording
>from both tuners) and a switch to select the PVR source to
>playback may be quite a bit cheaper than a PC solution. And
>probably a lot safer than dealing with Media Center!

I need to look at that myself. Thanks for pointing it out.

Bill

--
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

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