WinTV-PVR-usb2

[jbrychka]

Circuit City has this hardware for $150 after rebate. I picked one up and was very impressed with the picture right out of the box.

Is there any difference between this USB version VS the pvr-250?

[Opus4]

Where did you see the rebate for the USB2 model?

I've got the 250 & the USB2 models... the USB2 has FM in addition to the TV tuner, but be aware that you can't use the FM tuner & the TV tuner at the same time.

- Andy

[jbrychka]

It was in the Circuit City store in Denver. The rebate was on the shelf price sign but the funny thing was that the rebate form was not to be found so they gave me $50 off.

So is the picture quality, sound, stability and CPU utilization the same for both models?

[Opus4]

That's funny... I wonder if that was an old rebate, or if they jumped the gun on one coming up. They aren't advertising it currently & I don't see it in their online list of recent rebates.

I've only had the 2 tuners a short time, but I haven't noticed any difference in terms of picture/sound quality. This isn't surprising, since this site (http://www.shspvr.com/) shows them to have the same encoding chip, though my 250 has the '15' model of the Conexant chip. Neither one has made my system crash either (so far).

I haven't made definitive comparisons of cpu usage, but on my old system (p2-400; see other posts), cpu usage is less than 10% when just either one of them is recording. I'm using a usb2 connection, btw. Edit: ok, so cpu usage is usually less than 10% when _both_ are recording, with some 'spikes' of as much as 17%.

For my purposes, they are pretty similar in terms of results. The best part of the usb2 model is that it is such an easy installation, w/o that need to power-down & open the case.

- Andy

[dkardatzke]

That rebate, (at least the one I saw at CC) was only for the old USB device which is not supported by SageTV. If you got it on the usb2 consider yourself lucky!