Soft Cam or Hard Cam?

[scotty78]

Hi all have just ordered a Technotrend c-1500 pci card. From what I can understand if I want to go the soft cam route this and vplug/mdapi is what I need to get up and running via softcam on media portal.

If I want to go the hard cam route I need to buy a cam such as blue zeta get it flashed with joker software and also get and flash a smart card.

If I go the softcam route am I right in thinking things such as changing channel takes longer as all processing is done by your pc's cpu, where if I go the hardcam route all processing is done by the smart card. If I have a Q6600 how much of a issue is the softcam route going to be? surely I have more than enough processing power.

Is there any other advantage of going hard cam over software decoding? such as is the auto update easier to apply in the hard cam route.

What would the costs be for a cam with the appropriate firmware and also a flashed smartcard? rather than buy the flashing equipment and attempting to do it myself do any forum members do this kind of thing, where I could just add this to my system and do my own transponder search for my area.

Can anyone tell me if the technotrend card I have bought does h264 decoding? as it is discontinued I cant seem to find any further info on the net. Im not sure if our only hd channel on vm is even broadcast in h264 anyway.

Any advice would be great

Cheers

[biosonik]

-Q6600 is overkill, you will have zero processor issues.
-As for lag between channels changes - yes, there is lag, but not enough to class it as an issue.
-There are little to no benefits to using a hardcam with a TT-1501.
-Hardcam costs vary from about £40 (if you ask a forum member to flash the cam and funcard) to £100+ (do it all yourself)
-no h264 encoding on cable, think its just a higher res mpeg.

[scotty78]

Thanks for replying, I have the card installed now and working fine in dvb dream but doesnt like to play in progdvb, think it must be a codec issue as its all yellow and blurry when I try and use it. Dont think I will bother with hardcam for the time being anyway