[imelda]

I just finished playing around with the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1100, which includes a software MPEG2 encoder instead of a hardware encoder (as well as DVB-T), and can report the following results against the sibling 1300 which has a hardware encoder...

CPU usage with the 1100 hovered around the 35-40% mark, and with the 1300 hovered around the 10-15% mark. So roughly a 20-25% CPU hit, and this was on a P4 .3.7 EE with HT enabled, so it would be even worse on a low end system. I should have grabbed two of the cards to see how the software encoder coped with recording two channels at once, but I don't think it would have been pretty. When I get a chance I will try it out on some single and dual core CPUs to see what CPU usage is like.

This confirmed my thoughts, if you need to use analog cards, spend a little extra on a card with hardware encoding, the overall responsiveness of your system will be much better, and you should have less CPU heat as well.

i.