Plextor's ConvertX PX-TV100U $99 Personal Video Recorder
posted July 6th 2005 10:40AM
Today Plextor introduced their ConvertX PX-TV100U Personal Video Recorder which gives you enough kit for a decent do-it-yourself PC-based PVR. In fact, Plextor claims it's the "simplest and most affordable way to watch, record, and pause live TV." And maybe, just maybe, this isn't the usual marketing drivel. See, you just plug in your satellite, cable, or foil-swaddled-rabbit ears antenna into PX-TV100U's built-in TV tuner to record (via USB 2.0) to your PC's hard disk, CD, or DVD recorder in MPEG-1 (VCD), MPEG-2 (DVD), or DivX video formats. You then manage the PVR with SageTV Lite PVR software which features a 3-day electronic programming guide for quick setup of recordings. Hell, it even ships with Ulead VideoStudio SE DVD for editing and authoring interactive DVDs. Ok, it's not TiVo but it's only $99 and there aren't any monthly service fees… so there.
What no Mac love? Well for $99 I guess it'd be worth a throw to find out...
get dazzle dvc 80, it's a lot cheaper than that thing, and probably does just as well.
...or not.
You're probably better off spending an extra $100 on the Plextor Convert PX-TV402U...
http://www.divx.com/hardware/detail.php?p=29
The PX-TV402U has most the same features, but converts video to DivX or MPEG formats in its own hardware, rather than relying on your own CPU to do the conversion. Software conversion of live video is still pretty weak compared to dedicated hardware conversion.
Its useless for video editing if you're capturing to MPEG 1/2/4 since those are delivery only formats making use of temporal compression.
I'd spend an extra $100 and get a Pyro box from ADS which is DV compliant instead.
My biggest complaint with any of the external, or heck even the internal ones, is the lack of being able to interface with Digital Cable and/or set-top cable boxes. The only company I've seen even make an attempt to integrate this ability is MyTV. http://www.mytvstore.com/index.html
Now, if someone will only get a clue and put out more, and less expensive, Firewire 400/800 external devices that will play nice with SnapStream, SageTV, and/or MythTV I'd seriously consider getting one for our media server. Now, before someone asks "Why Firewire over USB?" the reason is FireWire and USB 2.0 is that USB 2.0 is still a host-based standard - the devices must be connected via a computer in order to communicate. But FireWire is a peer-to-peer standard, which means that the devices can be connected without going through a computer. To say nothing of the fact that, short of getting a dedicated USB 2.0 card for only connecting that one device, you'll wind up sharing bandwith with other USB devices on that hub slowing your speed down versus the dedicated speed you get via Firewire.
In either event it looks like we will have to stick with a WinTV-PVR-250MCE card for now. *shrug*
"My biggest complaint with any of the external, or heck even the internal ones, is the lack of being able to interface with Digital Cable and/or set-top cable boxes."
In what way do you use the word "interface"?
If you mean getting the digital signal directly from the cable box, unmolested, well, that's a limitation of the cable box. Some cable boxes do have firewire ports enabled (cable co's are required to offer at least one option), but the TV shows themselves are often flagged so they can't be recorded that way anyway. So this is pretty useless even if your box supports it (and the cable companies generally build this feature into their least desirable boxes anyway).
If by interface you simply mean working with the box to change channels, well, almost every PC-based PVR solution can do that. If you're working with SD, that's gonna be good enough for most anyone anyway. Yeah, you're re-compressing the analog signal, but this is SD we're talking about... and it's the same thing TiVo and Replay do too.
All of this will be definitively solved once there is better support for CableCARD and PC CC products start coming to market.
Almost *any* PC PVR product can use an IR blaster with digital cable, not just MythTV.
GBPVR, Snapstream BeyondTV, SageTV, etc all can do the same thing. Heck the Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 retail edition even comes with a little IR blaster!
In anycase, more on topic... I think it's great that the big 3rd party PVR SOftware folks are working with the hardware manufacturers to bundle better (if somewhat reduced feature set) software with the hardware. Plextor's other ConvertX PVR offerings (not including the Mac and eyeTV) comes bundled with the decidedly yucky winDVR5 application. Hauppauge cards come with the pedestrian WinTV2000.
DiamondMM is bundling Snapstream SE software with their PVR card offering/bundle, for example. Plextor w/sageTV is taking a step in the right direction.
rampy
Jeff,
My apologies. I should have been more specific but I meant from the cable box to the HTPC for both the signal and cable box control.
I know that some, not all, of the signals are flagged to not be recorded. However, those are mostly with the pay stations such as PPV and HBO. On other stations, such as History Channel or Discovery HD, I've yet to see any such difficulty arise. It is mildly irritating that we wind up having to record things on the integrated PVR and then have to squirt it out to a capture card on our system rather than just grabbing it at the time we record it.
In regards to the changing of the channels, granted, you can do that with SD or basic cable but it pretty much is non-existant short of a couple of solutions for any situation using a cable box. Anyone who has had to use an IR Blaster can probably give you plenty of horror stories about this. CableCARD may solve this part of the equasion but, honestly, I do not think it will ever happen on the PC considering all of the hand-wringing going on over the broadcast flag.
Sounds a lot like elgato's eyeTV wonder for mac. I picked one up for $130. I've read some reviews saying it doesn't record so well on older macs, but it's smooth on my g5. It does require the processor to do all of the compressing and converting, as this Plextor device does too, so you'll need a beefy machine.
Just throw a Hauppauge WinTV PVR150/250/350 into your PC (130$ w/ SageTV bundled in at pcalchemy.com) and you'll be much better off. Hardware encoding, so it's easy on your cpu. And when bundled with Sage..well.. install and enjoy. And if anyone's interested in learning more about htpc and pvrs and so forth, I learned a lot just by reading the forums at byopvr.com.
Get the Hauppauge PVR-150.. it's one of the best and is $59.
"To say nothing of the fact that, short of getting a dedicated USB 2.0 card for only connecting that one device, you'll wind up sharing bandwith with other USB devices on that hub slowing your speed down versus the dedicated speed you get via Firewire."
I don't think that's entirely accurate or clear. Your talking about an unpowered usb hub. An active, or powered, USB hub does not share bandwith; each port gets its own dedicated channel of a theoretical limit of 480 Mbps. Of course, I'm sure you knew this already. And while USB was not specifically designed for peer-to-peer connections like Firewire, it is still possible.