If you've ever had the urge to build your own media center PC, but weren't sure where to begin, you're not alone. While there are a number of excellent resources on the net, HTPCnews has updated their already fantastic writeup of a variety of hardware mpeg2-encoding cards. This article should be required reading for anyone looking to set up a new system or upgrade a current home theater setup.HTPCnews looks at cards by Hauppauge, ATI, and NEC, as well as several reference designs that found their way into PCI cards from a number of different manufacturers.
One type of card that I hadn't been too familiar with were those based on the ViXS XCode II video processor. This chip is powerful enough to encode 4 separate MPEG2 streams at the same time. Most cards currently on the market only capture and convert one or two television signals. But with this processor, we could see 3 or 4-tuner cards down the road.
Possibly the handiest feature of this article is the chart on the last page that shows which cards are compatible with various PVR software packages. It only shows BeyondTV, SageTV, Windows Media Center 2005, and MythTV 0.19, which probably accounts for the majority of HTPC setups. But it would be nice to have a chart that includes GB-PVR, Media Portal, and other free solutions.
The long and short of it is, I would recommend any of these cards over the cheaper software-based MPEG2 encoding cards on the market. You get what you pay for, and all hardware-based cards encode video with relatively low strain on your CPU, allowing you to get high quality video without crashing your computer.
