Twinhan StarBox vs. 102G

[carload]

Looking at the specs for the Twinhan StarBox USB device and the 102G PCI card, they look almost identical. The difference that jumps out at me is that the StarBox lists "De-multiplexing, Engine: Hardware", but all the Twinhan PC cards list "Software".

Does this mean that the StarBox has a processor that does some of the work in processing the DVB signal? I've got an older computer that barely meets the requirements (it's 800MHz), so if the StarBox would be less of a strain on the CPU, maybe it would work better with it.

 

[W_Tracy_Parnell]

I am also interested in the differences between the PCI card and stand-alone box. One thing I noticed is nobody could really tell me (including Twinhan whom I emailed) if the USB box does HD and 4:2:2. From what I can tell the 102g does. I am pretty "cramped up" for space in my PC towers so a stand-alone wouls suit me fine, although I could probably make the 102g fit.

 

[CharredPC]

If you mean does it do 4:2:2 or HD at ALL, the answer's yes, the Twinhan 102g does. But through software, not hardware.

Also I haven't yet gotten my nice new home theater to play HD properly. It's always laggy and/or slow. With certain codecs/graphs, it runs full frame rate, but way too slow; with other codecs/graphs, it keeps up with the audio but skips frames jerkily to keep up. That's a little scary, since I have a 1.5+ Ghz pc, all new parts, a fast hd and a fresh install of WinXP. Maybe someday I'll find some kind of add-on pci decoder card that can handle it.

 

[timmy1376]

The USB Starbox will do HD.