My new DVB capture card, part 2 - It's working out well but there are a couple of issues worth noting;

• The card has to have a unique IRQ assigned to it. Now with the machine I put it in the P&P BIOS insisted on giving it the same interrupt as at least one other card. I tried all the tricks and eventually (in the last PCI slot - why is it always the last?!) managed to get it hogging the same interrupt as the onboard USB. I could do without USB so disabled it and we were nearly there.
• The card is demanding when capturing from the Freeview feed (why? it isn't having to decode/re-encode any video, just file away the MPEG2 stream as delivered) - I suppose extracting a stream from the 38meg MUX is a pretty clever thing to do.
• I get much better TiVO-style live TV pause when driving the display at 16 bit colour rather than 32 bit (millions of colours). The resolution seems irrelevant as does driving the video overlay surface directly or via DirectDraw - that confused me.
• On the AMD Athlon XP1700 chip there is just enough poke - if I hit that machine over the network for either file transfer or VNC while it's recording it drops frames. I've got a couple of bids on eBay for XP1900 chips at the moment!
• Media Portal looks like a good alternative to Compro's app (which is fine) - Saul has good things to say about Media Portal (even going as far as saying it's better than Windows MediaCentre!). Two of the things they recommend is starting from a fresh XP install and using a different drive for capturing to that where your Windows swap-partition is located. I think I'll give those recommendations a go.

So - I have captured a few things (including four hours of french tuition programmes on BBC2) with success but I feel I sailing a bit close to the wind performance wise - gotta defrag that partition again!