MPEG-4 Hardware Endcoder TV Tuner Card: Compro VedioMate E900F

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theboxseat

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#27942 12-Nov-2008 00:24

Hi all, this is my first post and it is good to be here.

I have just bought a very expensive TV tuner card.
I take delivery of it in a day or 2 and cannot wait.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/multimedia/review/2008/09/30/Compro-VideoMate-E900F/p1

The above link describes all the bells and wistles, but the primary reason for making this purchase
was the hardware encoding.

I have encoded so many of my DVDs into MP4s (AVIs), I kind of figured that if I was capturing video,
why wouldn't I do so encoding it directly to an AVI?.

As you are all aware, all the tuners on the market, seem to be boasting, that they have hardware
encoding for MPEG-1,-2, but the Compro is the only one, that I have encountered, that doesn't encode
to a 20 year old compression format!

I will advise how it goes

Cheers

sbiddle

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#177480 12-Nov-2008 06:50

First off - what do you plan on actually viewing with this card? If you are planning on using it for Freeview|HD it's rather worthless as something like an HVR2200 will do exactly the same thing. MPEG encoding is only useful if you're encoding an analogue input. If you're using it for Freeview|HD the TS stream from the DVB-T broadcast is written straight to HD in it's native H.264 format, the TV card doesn't do any sort of transcoding in any way.

The card won't do any transcoding into AVI, you're still going to need software to do that for you. AVI is not the same as MPEG4.

Nety

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#177519 12-Nov-2008 10:53

I really hope this works out for you. However I suspect you might find that it causes you more greaf then it is worth.

The mpeg 4 encoding is not likely to be of use as I suspect it will only be affective if you are encoding a analoge signal coming in from one of the analoge inputs on the card so it will not help at all for encoding DVD's.

As far freeview goes it really pays to get a card that is known to work. They all need hacks or support for freeview in the drivers . There are only a limited number of cards that have this support.

As I said I really hope it works out for you but I think you may not get the benifit of the extra money you paid for it.

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theboxseat

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#177552 12-Nov-2008 13:09

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Thanks for the feedback.

I have got MySky HDi,

First reason:                                       The content - Yeah, I know it is crap, but still better than the alternatives
Second reason:                                 The PVR function works really well
Third reason:                                     Adverts - I hate them, more than the average bear.
Fourth reason:                                  Sky's EPG

If I had free view, and I do have a UDF aerial, the feed would be MPEG4, but then, I would have to edit out the adverts, etc

With MySky, I am going to say the easiest way, to permanently save content, one needs to run through a TV capture card, and this I believe can only be analogue.

So on a day to day basis, I use the extremely flexible MySky
Content, I wish to save, I put to the HTPC and it is automatically hardware encoded to MPEG-4.

AVI of course is a container for the MPEG-4 compression format

So thanks again for your inputs

and any further comments, clarification would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Jim

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#177585 12-Nov-2008 16:00

OK sounds like it might be the ticket for you after all then.. will be interested to see how it works for you.