Full-featured Card

A Full-featured Card (short full-featured or sometimes premium) is an Euphemism that describes the early Siemens, Hauppauge and Technotrend DVB-Cards with onboard AV711x chip used as MPEG2 Decoder.

From a today's point of view they are just outdated and forcing people to blow their money for a hardware decoder they really don't need (every recent PC with more than ~500MHz is able to decode MPEG2 Streams in software without any extra cost). No modern card design repeated this approach, Microsoft even denies to support this type of cards in their BDA Driver Architecture. Cards without encoder are called budget in this terminology.

For a long time the VDR Project unfortunately forced it's users to install at least one of these expensive cards in their system. Today it is however highly recommended to install the VDR Software Decoder Plugin instead and let the "Full-featured Cards" die better sooner than later. You can spend your money a better way, invite your girlfriend for a ice-cream or drink some beer with your friends.