Cat's Eye 164e Support

[clmolnar]

Does SageTV support the Cat's Eye 164e?

http://www.vboxcomm.com/product3.htm

I have one ordered, and should be receiving it in the next couple weeks. I am interested in knowing if it will work with SageTV or if I will be running into issues upon trying to use it.

Thanks.
Carl

*edit* I should add that the card will be arriving in the US to OEM vendors on Oct. 26th, so chances are no one actually has it yet. So my question really is to the SageTV techs: Do you expect that this card will work with the SageTV 6 beta?

[taltman]

An email to vbox's tech support said YES - sage supports their products. They also said that ANALOG recordings do not use hw encoding - the CPU must convert analog sdtv data to mpeg files. This sounds like a bad design to me.

When you get the card let us know what your CPU consumption is like for recording sdtv, and hdtv shows. I'd be interested to see if the tech support actually knows what they are talking about...

/Tal

[blade]

Originally Posted by taltman

They also said that ANALOG recordings do not use hw encoding - the CPU must convert analog sdtv data to mpeg files. This sounds like a bad design to me.

I thought almost all of the HD capture cards used software encoding for analog capture.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by blade

I thought almost all of the HD capture cards used software encoding for analog capture.

The ATI 650 is the only card I know of that can hardware encode.

The Theater 650 Pro performs full on-chip MPEG-2 encoding of both video and audio in
dedicated hardware, significantly reducing the impact of this computationally-intensive
operation on the system CPU. Also, by combining the audio encoding process on the same
hardware as the video, perfect synchronization is achieved on every recording.

Gerry

[lobosrul]

I think theyre talking about analog hardware encoding.

Anyone advertising a card with HDTV/digital hardware encoding is lieing. ATSC streams come in already encoded (MPEG2).

[blade]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

I think theyre talking about analog hardware encoding.

We are talking about analog.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by lobosrul

I think theyre talking about analog hardware encoding.

Originally Posted by blade

We are talking about analog.

Gerry

[phenixdragon]

Where did you order it from? And what's the price it is going for? I'd like to get one for myself.

[clmolnar]

I bought it from the same guy that is selling them on eBay. Here:

http://store.dottymedia.com

I paid $215 for the card including shipping, he has raised the price since then unfortunately.

As soon as I get it and try it out, I'll let you guys know how it works.