🚀 go-pugleaf

Arny Krueger wrote:
> "Romeo Rondeau" <eveyone@ease.com> wrote in message
> news:FAn7j.77129$YL5.8985@newssvr29.news.prodigy.net
>> Arny Krueger wrote:
>>> "David B." <brooks.dj@nomail.com> wrote in message
>>> news:uO0Gx22OIHA.4912@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl
>>>> Do you even know what Media Center is/does?
>>>> It's been around for 5 years and is used by many people
>>>> as a PVR/cable box replacement, does a great job, it's
>>>> also available in Vista.
>>> Compared to running any of the PVR software packages
>>> that are sold with video tuner and capture cards, it
>>> really doesn't seem to do anything that is terribly
>>> unique.
> 
>> It does look cool on an HDTV, and that's what it was
>> designed to do :-)
> 
> Yes, but the PVR software/hardware does the same stuff. If you're in the 
> market, ADS cards come with what seems to be the best software.  I picked up 
> a pretty functional HDTV package for XP by ADS from Amazon for about $60.

I was talking about the interface.

> 
> If you want to expunge what the PVR software does to your system from your 
> system, you just uninstall it. So far I haven't found that it creates any 
> big black holes while installed, other than creating a lot of I/O when you 
> are recording or playing video, or when you are time-shifting.
> 
> One other thing is that the third party software that comes with the TV 
> tuner and video capture cards seems to have a fair amount of cross-vendor 
> compatibility. For example, I've inter-operated PVR software and cards from 
> ADS and ATI.

Yeah, it worked through WDM! :-)

> 
> If you run Windows MCE your tuner/capture card needs to provide special 
> software for running with Windows MCE.  I've run cards that came with MCE 
> drivers with other vendor's PVR software. So MCE reduces your options.

I hate to break it to you Arny, but all of the video input and output 
cards use WDM to communicate and they all do it through the OS. It used 
to be proprietary (15 years ago), it's all standard stuff now. Hell, I 
once hooked up an old analog video camera and a really old ATI input 
card and used it as a webcam in Yahoo IM. I can't conceive of any modern 
capture card NOT providing drivers for Windows MCE, as a matter of fact 
most of the existing ones will be supported already by the OS, just like 
they are right now with plain old vanilla Windows XP. Sure, you'll need 
custom MCE drivers for enhanced functionality but the basics are already 
supported.