Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Chris’ comment about PVRs yesterday revealed some interesting things (well, ok, so not interesting to most). The first is that the Digiguide team are working on their own PVR software. The current previews work to record a show, but it appears they’re also working on new software to allow remote setting of a recording (eg over the web). Not bad.
Reading around also gave an indication of success rates with different bits of hardware. First up it seems that the current Digiguide preview software will pretty much whack the hell out of a normal TV card setup. It didn’t appear to be possible to get 720*480 without dropping frames on most setups. And those that got by at lower resolutions were using 95% CPU time.
It seemed the way around this is a rather more expensive TV card with onboard MPEG encoding.
But there is a downside to this route (as well as the extra cost, more than double a normal TV card), and that’s that some existing PVR software won’t use it.
All in all I’m inclined to wait. The Digiguide stuff looks great on paper, but is still previews and ideas, nothing particularly concrete. I think I’ll wait until the software is better developed, and then see where it’s all at. Probably save a little money on the hardware by then too.
Posted by Phil on May 30, 2003 06:48 AM | Categories: Technology