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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sjevtic" data-source="post: 851431" data-attributes="member: 118214">I purchased a Colossus as part of my my evaluation of MediaPortal, with the plan of capturing component and TOSLink from a set top box. Though the released driver at the time (29291) produced some issues, such as breaks in the captured video, the then-beta driver (29361) produced consistently good results on my Windows 7 x64 system. I continue to be impressed by the results all around. Great job, Team MediaPortal! Inspired by the results, I wanted to scale to 3 STBs, but faced a problem: I don't have any more PCIe slots. After a bit of reading, I learned that the HD-PVR is supposed to effectively be an external version of the Colossus. So, I got three HD-PVRs to go along with my new STBs, a USB hub, and set out with the latest driver (1.6.29353). After that, I've had nothing but problems. Just a couple of days in, one of the HD-PVRs stopped recording completely. Though the LEDs came on as if it were working, it never produced a video stream. Of the remaining two units, I have encountered frequent situations where a HD-PVR becomes unresponsive, requiring a power cycle and corresponding restart of TV-Server. I also encounter occasional breaks in the audio and video streams while watching live TV in standard quality mode, though the problem seems to be less common in high quality mode. Also, I've seen some glitches in the recordings made by the HD-PVRs. I got the impression from the greater Internet that the Colossus and HD-PVR are pretty comparable devices. Both get largely favorable reviews, along with the occasional negative ones. However, a sampling of the forum suggests that the MediaPortal community feels differently. I found these two comments while searching;    This largely mirrors my personal experience, so, I am contemplating abandoning my HD-PVR based solution while I can still return them. The alternative would be to build a Micro-ATX system that could house three Colossus cards, TV-Server, and a small handful of other services. Before I head down that route though, I'm hoping for a bit more input. Particularly:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Which is the better STB capture solution: HD-PVR or Colossus? Why?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Any suggestions for improving the stability or recording quality of the HD-PVR.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Does performance/stability of Colossus devices drop when multiple cards are used?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Are special cooling considerations required to accommodate multiple Colossus cards?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How does the Colossus/TV-Server perform on Windows Server 2008?</li> </ul>Thanks. Sasha</blockquote>

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