Annoyance with Hauppage Soft PVR

[DB83]

I've got a fairly old BT878 based Win-TV PCI card but it does come with soft-pvr.

Now there are times when I simply want to do a quick/one-click mpeg-1 recording. I do not use the tuner just direct composite input.

Now here is the annoyance (unless I have missed something in the set-up). The input signal is PAL so I would expect 352*288 @ 25 fps.

However, what I end up with is 352*240 @ 29.97 fps - NTSC !!!!

There is (apparently) no way to configure the mpeg settings under the 'configure mpeg' menu but I can change the avi ones to PAL. There's another annoyance here as I have to do this each time I run the program - the previous settings are not retained. I can live with this.

So, have I missed something ?

[jman98]

I have a Hauppauge PVR-350, so I'm not familiar with your card. If it uses WinTV2K you might look at
http://www.cask-of-amontillado.com/htpc.html
The "General Tips" section might be of interest to you. If you have a different recording program (is that what you call "soft-pvr"?) then it's probably useless to you.

Perhaps your card was originally sold in North America and thus defaults to NTSC. Almost all video capture cards sold here do NTSC only and it takes various registry hacks to make them do PAL as well. The only card I've ever personally seen that out of the box was capable of recording PAL and NTSC and just used whichever it detected the input signal was using was the old Dazzle DVC-II.

[DB83]

Just to clarify, the 'soft-pvr' is part of the WinTv2K program.

Thanks for that link. I checked the registry entries under 'general tips' but I could not find an override option.

But whilst browsing the registry I did find a default recording mode for the mpeg and it was set for NTSC mpeg-1. As there were binary settings there for PAL mpeg-1, I thought it would be a simple matter to change the default over. No !. As soon as I run the program, another check of the registry shows that the default has gone back to NTSC mpeg-1. So some other setting is clearly controlling this.

And. Surely you should not have to tweak the registry for these settings.

[DB83]

Well I seem to have fixed it.

When I set this beast up I simply had a composite input and it showed 'C1' as the source.

Messing around with the Channel Suites, I set up a new composite channel (200 was arbitarally selected) and did another test recording.

Voila !! PAL recording and the registry entry also defaults to PAL

And the overide options are in the registry as well