ATI Wonder Pro question

[johnson636]

I just got word from directron that my order for a pvr-500 was on backorder; card was not in stock. my local bestbuy has a ATI Wonder Pro for 69.99. Will this tv tuner work although I have a Geforce 7800GT graphics card?

Is the ATI wonder pro compatible with sagetv?

[mike1961]

AFAIK the ATI should work just fine but the PVR-500 is a dual tuner card and I don't think ATI makes a dual tuner as of yet.

Mike

[johnson636]

I was gonna purchase two of the Wonder pros. Will that setup work? Is this a good tuner. Will sagetv work with it? Is it better than the vivo feature of my 7800GT?

[mike1961]

The ATI and Hauppauge tuners are the most popular and should work just fine. I recently bought some ATI's for testing and noticed that they did not come with an IR cable so you also have to figure out how you will be controlling the set top box either via the com port or IR cable or perhaps you will not be using a box if you are just viewing channels 2-99. The advantage of the pvr500 is that you need one pci slot instead of 2.

Mike

[johnson636]

How old is the ATI wonder pro in tuerms of release date? Is it worth getting the ATI wonder pro? Does it have hardware encoding?

[thatdude90210]

The TV wonder pro is not a hardware encoding card, it's over a year old. I don't think it's listed as being supported by Sage.
http://www.sagetv.com/requirements.html?sageSub=tv

[mike1961]

There are some ATI cards that do "real time" encoding which I assume means it has built on mpeg2 encoders just as the Hauppauge cards have.

Mike

[dbfresh23]

Originally Posted by mike1961

There are some ATI cards that do "real time" encoding which I assume means it has built on mpeg2 encoders just as the Hauppauge cards have.

Those would be the cards based on the Theater Pro 550 Chipset

[johnson636]

I think I'll just wait on a pvr-500.

They're sold out everywhere. Well at least places that I'm famillar with.

I have another question, What exactly do I need a USbuirt (or something like that) for? I read lots of people complaining about remotes not working, so I ask, what is the best remote to get? Are the remotes difficult to deal with or a pain to setup? Will I need anything besides what comes with the card in order to start watching and recording tv?


Actually, thats about 5 questions

[dbfresh23]

Originally Posted by johnson636

I think I'll just wait on a pvr-500. They're sold out everywhere. Well at least places that I'm famillar with.

PCAlchemy isn't sold out - and they are one of the better / more trusted HTPC stores online. www.pcalchemy.com