I am interested in using my PC as a TiVo of sorts, that is, doing real-time MPEG captures of TV shows and transferring them to my laptop for viewing while I am free at school. I own a capture card, an ATI TV Wonder PCI, and my system specs are as follows:

1GHz Intel Pentium III-B
PCChips M758LMR board (SiS 630 chipset)
512 MB SDRAM at 133MHz
On-board graphics (SiS 630) and sound (C-Media CMI8738)
ATI TV Wonder PCI capture board
2 40GB ATA100 disks (1 NTFS 1 Ext3)
Windows XP Professional SP1a
Mandrake Linux 9.1 (not being used for this)

To be short, I am having a/v sync problems. Before you more seasoned board members roll your eyes and ignore this message, I ask that you hear me out. I have read the sticky message in this forum concerning a/v sync problems. I am using PowerVCR II with the BtWinCap drivers (I have both heard about and experienced ATI's software hell). I used the Advanced Profiles|MPEG-1 Excellent. Specs of which are similar to this (I don't remember exactly):

352x240
3000 Kbps video
Fine Encoding
MP2 audio 224Kbps 2-ch

The show, which is late-night so it runs for about 1 hour and 5 minutes, started out okay but gradually lost sync about 5-10 minutes in and didn't get worse after about 10 minutes. PowerVCR split the MPEGs into 600MB files, and I don't know why and I can't find a setting concerning this.

Also, I am planning to upgrade my PC significantly this holiday season. The upgrade I am planning is (irrelavent items like the modem and cooling fan have been left out):

2.2GHz Pentium 4 400MHz FSB
Intel D865GBF Desktop Board (Intel 865 Chipset)
512 MB PC3200 400MHz DDR RAM
On-Board Graphics (Intel Extreme Graphics)
C-Media CMI8738 PCI (NOT on-board) sound card

I added the PCI sound card (board has on-board sound, which I'll probably disable) because of the suggestion in the sticky a/v sync thread, and also because it is only about $10. My concern is that since I am having troubles with this current board that maybe using a PCI card with the same chipset won't fix anything. Do I have valid concerns here?

Finally, My CPU far outstrips the recommended clock speeds for many of the profiles in PowerVCR II, so this kind of leaves me baffled. Capturing to AVI and then using TMPGEnc to encode produces fine results, but this won't work for a daily scheduled record.

To sum up, my questions are:

--> What software (drivers and DVR software) is best for my combination of hardware, both now and after the upgrade?

--> Should I make any changes to my upgrade plans (like a different-chipset sound card) to improve chances of the a/v sync issue going away?

--> Do on-board graphics (as opposed to an AGP graphics card) affect this a/v sync issue? I can usually get less than a dozen dropped frames, if any at all (usually none), but if I drop one or two it causes this problem.

I feel like I've left something out, so if I have I would appreciate it if someone would TELL me instead of ignoring me. Thank you all.

andrewb758