video card for multimedia movie /music buff? AGP vs PCI

[Pugutopia111]

Hi, I am a movie fanatic who owes several thousand DVD’s. I DVR television and so most of my time watching flicks or DVR’d TV. My family got me a PMD for Christmas a Samsung Yepp! This is great….. except my DVD’s have to be ripped and converted to WMA to view, not a problem though. Anyway to get the point…. my 128mb AGP card went out on me this weekend so I need to get another graphics card. The one that went out was a G-force and had a video in which I never used, but now with my PMD I want to capture some of my DVR’d TV events to watch on the go! I want to upgrade to 256mb and would like a card that is multimedia persons dream. I am not into gaming at all so what should I get? I want to try to stay moderately priced maybe no more then $200-$250. Should I go AGP again? or will PCI work? Also what is PCI Express?

[redwudz]

You could look at a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350. It's a PCI video capture card with hardware MPEG encoding.

PCI-E uses a newer type motherboard. Not compatible with PCI or AGP.

[Pugutopia111]

It looks good! But I would still need a Video display card? Right? If so what do you recommend? I was sort of looking for one card that does it all. Right now my desktop computer is down until get a VGA card! So I thought this would be the time to step up to really good one!

[redwudz]

It's hard to find a video card that does it all. But if you went with the Hauppauge, you would still need a VGA card. A decent VGA video card, a Asus Radeon 9550 SE 128MB 8X/4X AGP VGA Card is inexpensive, about $60US. Has TV and DVI out, besides the VGA out. It uses the ATI chipset and there are other brands with the same chipset. I use it to output through the DVI port and a ATI Component adapter to my video projector. Nice option for future use.

I like the idea of the Hauppauge card with the hardware encoder. You can just take the MPEG-2 it generates and drop it into an authoring program and burn as DVD. MPEG-2 capture works best if you don't need to do extensive editing. But there are some good MPEG editors. MPEG-VCR, VideoReDo are popular for simple, inexpensive editors.

[Pugutopia111]

What about a ALL-IN-WONDER 2006 256MB AGP? It seems like a lot ofbang for the buck?