Hello and welcome to my first posting here!

Last week I bought my first TV card in my entire live. Ok, LONG before
I had a FAST AV Master, a MIRO DC30 and GfxBoards from nvidia/ati with
video in. But now it's time for an analog TV card with MPEG2 hardware encoding.

After reading several poor reviews all over the net, I decided for the one with the best balance between price and performance... The Leadtek PVR2000 for 79 EUR.

But this card is a disappointing one, because:

- while recording with the mpeg2 hw codec, I have audio glitches every 15..20 seconds

- only TV seeing takes 10 to 20% of cpu load (on my Athlon "XP3500")

- HW MPEG2 Encoding and seeing parallel takes 38 to 65% cpu load; I red in a review, that someone could play doom3 smooth while recording... this must be a joke

- the mpeg2 quality ist bad, even in the optimal setting... if i use the software compression of mainconcept mpeg2 encoder with similar settings also in real time, I got far better results with cpu load about 90%

- you cannot see your live tv signal interlaced, e.g. with bob... you only get the "great" built-in leadtek deinterlacer at 25fps(PAL) and not 50fps from frame adding

- AND THE BIGGEST LOSS: the hw mpeg codec can only record with this sucking deinterlacer and so you can't get interlaced material on your disk


Well, in my opinion and with my experiences last days, the internal hw mpeg2 compression is a waste of money, because if you like acceptable quality, you have to use a 3rd party mpeg2 software encoder. So you can take a much cheaper card.

Maybe, anyone of you can tell me (especially on the deinterlacing point),
how the other cards with hw compression manage this...

Regards,
Robin.