Hauppauge Better than AIW? Help

[Joe_Blough]

I was all ready to buy the 9800 Pro AIW and while looking for a deal I came across this site http://www.hotdealsclub.com/ which says the Hauppauge is better for recording TV than the AIW.

quote-
"I have heard so many bad things about people who get a All-in-Wonder card and hope to do some serious TV recording"

Furthermore the comments at

http://www.hotdealsclub.com/text/hauppauge2/

say about the AIW -

"If you do *anything* else while the card is
recording live TV, such as playing a 3D game, watching a DVD movie, burning a CD, etc., then the video will hiccup or skip considerably".

and

"Reports are numerous that if you do anything other than watch the live TV, even simple things like surf the web, you will have skips and hiccups with your recordings."

Can anyone shed some light on this?
If this is the case I'd be better off getting a 9800Pro and seperate Hauppauge card. Could this guy perhaps be talking about slower AIW cards?
Help.

[jmiddleton]

The Hauppauge PVR250 and PVR350 use a hardware encoder chip to convert the video stream into MPEG2 in real time. The All-in-Wonder and TV Wonder use the system processor to perform this function. For low resolution, VHS quality recording, the system CPU can do the job but for high resolution, DVD quality recording, you really need a hardware encoder. ATI have recognized this and their latest offering, the E-home Wonder does have a hardware encoder and is significantly less expensive than the Hauppauge cards. The main benifit of the Hauppauge cards right now is that thay are fully supported by commercial PVR applications like Beyond TV (snapstream.com) and Sage TV (freytechnologies.com).

[sumrtym]

I have a 2.6 Ghz system and an AIW 9800 Pro. I can certainly surf the web and record at the same time as recording uses ~34-36% of the CPU. However, they are correct about playing something like UT2004 or other 3D game at the same time. You wouldn't want to do that. Other than that, quality ought to be the same on recordings whether your CPU does it or it's hardware. CPU gives you more flexibility in using different codecs and formats when recording which is an added benefit. I don't game at the same time as a recording, and it's not a problem.

I don't know if this makes any difference, but I also record to a HDD array independent of my OS and applications.

[doctj]

If you're using your tv tuner card in the living room I guess a hardware encoder is probably better. I use the aiw radeon 32 mb and it serves all my needs and has made my vcr obsolete but it's sitting in my study not my living room. When I get a htpc if ATI does not release the encode hardware assist software for non OEM's I will have to part ways with ATI and MMC.