PVR Recording Skips

[swiftrhett]

I have a winfast 2000 PVR TV card thing, and anything I try to record has skipping video and audio. I have a AMD-64 3000 with 2GB RAM and 2 ATA-100 hard drives. Are my hard drives too slow or do I need a better card?

[BBill]

From what I understand the winfast 2000 (Leadtek) is a lower quality card which does not do hardware encoding it relies on software to do the video encoding / processing.

The higher quality cards do hardware encoding, its built into the TV card and it does not offload the video processing onto the processor of your PC. The result of hardware encoding is much better quality recordings.

Some of the good hardware cards are the
Hauppauge PVR250/PVR350
or the SAPPHIRE Theater 550 PRO TV Tuner Card - Retail

The Sapphire is actually the newest technology available at this time, its about $70.00 US at Newegg.com
I have the 550 Pro and I like it.

The Hauppauge cards very good cards and have been around a while and lots of PVR applications were built to support them. They are always a safe buy.

Is your recording source cable?

You might be able to improve the quality of your recordings with your existing card if you make sure your PC is doing nothing but recording at the time of recording. Since the PC is doing the processing instead of the TV card any processing interruption can affect the recording.