Trying to upgrade to PVR

[RangerRick]

Hey guys, this is my 1st post. You can see from my profile what my system is. I bought it from ABS almost 3 yrs ago.

I've bought a Liteon LDW-851S DVD writer, an Avermedia PCI 500 tuner card, and a Western Digital 200gig 7200 rpm hard drive.

I'm new at this and know enough just to be dangerous. Any suggestions or info that would be helpful would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[flaninacupboard]

do you have a specific issue or question?

[RangerRick]

I would just like to know if someone out there knows if my system is capable of handling this change and new hardware. Tips on configuring the new set-up, etc. Anything that would be helpful to me.

[flaninacupboard]

well there's no reason the hardware won't work.

is the card a realtime MPEG card? if not a faster CPU is required for real time MPEG encoding.

other than that it's a bit vague. if you run into a problem then holler, but you should be fine.

[RangerRick]

The tuner card does have a built in decoder. So it doesn't depend on the computer CPU to do the decoding.

Sorry to be so vague. This is the 1st time at doing something like this. I'm not sure of how to configure the hard drives and writers, other than I think it would be better to have the 200gig drive and the DVD writer on separate IDE channels to get better through-put.

I'm also hoping that the hardware I am going to use is OK. I would hate to install it, then find out about problems that other people have been having with it.

Anyway, thanks for responding to my post. I haven't spent much time in this forum, but it is really cool that you guys are so good about sharing the knowledge you have.

Thanks

[flaninacupboard]

if you're only dealing with MPEG then throughput is not such a big consideration. it used to be an issue with people capturing uncompressed video at 20Mb/s but MPEG is more like 2Mb/s. do a quick search on the forum for IDE setup, you'll get a whole load of opinions - there's no definitive "correct" way of setting up a system.
As i said with general hardware, whack it in and try it - if you get problems, just ask.

[RangerRick]

Thanks, flaninacupboard, that is exactly the type of tip I'm looking for. Something to get me started.