Hauppauge Colossus HD-PVR

[BOMOON]

It's been a while since I used my HD PVR (similar to the Colossus but without the HDMI input) and I don't have it or the software installed right now. I seem to recall Arcsoft's record module had an explicit "turn of display" setting. WinTV had what looked like a pause button on the little panel with the recording controls. It didn't pause the recording but turned off the display.

I verified that that the Pause button in WinTV pauses the video monitor while capturing, but doesn't pause the recording to the captured file. Unfortunately it didn't help with the "stuttering" problem in the captured file.

I wasn't able to find a "turn off display" in Arcsoft. However I don't think I'm using one of the older versions that you referenced in one of your other posts.

This frustrating problem is still defying any attempts to fix it.

Occam's Razor suggests the simplest solution, which is that the Hauppauge just can't capture very well on this PC. Maybe the card is crap in a 32-bit OS environment.

I've noticed occasional "stutters" even at the 720 X 480 resolution in this card's capture files.

The Canopus card outperforms the Colossus at that resolution. It captures at higher bitrates and there are never any audio/video stutters bad enough for me to notice. I think that says something important about the quality of the Hauppauge on this platform. Compared to the Canopus, it just doesn't cut it. There's no way that should be happening. An HD capture card should perform at least as well as an SD capture card at the same SD resolutions. If the Colossus can't do that, then maybe I should be looking at other capture card options, not just a platform overhaul to 64-bit.

[jagabo]

What kind of CPU usage are you seeing while capturing SD and HD? Does it change when the display is disabled?

[jman98]

Occam's Razor suggests the simplest solution, which is that the Hauppauge just can't capture very well on this PC. Maybe the card is crap in a 32-bit OS environment.

It is extremely unlikely that 32 bit is your problem as we've had no posts in the past to suggest this but I have no way to test this as I only have 64 bit Win 7. Usually if anything has a problem it's 64 bit Windows and not 32 bit.

It seems most likely to me that either you're doing something wrong and not realizing it and thus not telling us or that your PC simply for some reason doesn't play nice with this card. This is starting to get into the territory where we would have to physically look at your system and watch what you do to probably have any chance of helping you. The old Hauppauge PVR-150 was a real bitch to get working and a lot of people ended up returning the card because it never worked and others had no problems at all using it. I suppose there's always some chance that the Colossus is more problematic than many of us realize. There are some hostile reviews on Amazon of the card, but I have always just assumed that those who wrote them were stupid users. You seem to have good PC skills, so I think it's unlikely that you don't know what you are doing, but there may be something that's just not quite right and you're missing it.

If I remember you told us that your hardware is pretty old and maybe there's actually something wrong with your hardware (ie. some kind of problem with your PCIe slot) that is causing the issue. If there's a problem specific to the PCIe slot, that would explain why the PC is OK in general but the card doesn't work well. But that's just a guess and could be wrong.

[jagabo]

Keep in mind that there appear to be no engineers at Hauppauge that understand video any more. All they do these days is buy reference designs and sell them under the Hauppauge name.

[Seeker47]

It looks as though I'll be stuck with low-res captures for the time being. Essentially, I'm not much better off than I was with the Canopus SD captures.

Remind me -- which Canopus card are you referring to ? One that requires the no-longer-used AGP type slot ?

So, Canopus is gone and out of the game at this point: no more recent HD products from them, to compete with the others ?

[Cauptain]

Hi BOMOON,

You can do a test?

Download MIRILLIS ACTION, Turn on your PS3/CONSOLE, open WINTV and capture using ACTION "action desktop region"

If you can record at 60fps, you will have discovered the problem in your PC over your TV card.








Claudio

[jagabo]

Hi BOMOON,

You can do a test?

Download MIRILLIS ACTION, Turn on your PS3/CONSOLE, open WINTV and capture using ACTION "action desktop region"

If you can record at 60fps, you will have discovered the problem in your PC over your TV card.

This makes no sense. The Colossus is a hardware h.264 encoding card. It's not recording from the screen and it isn't using the CPU or GPU to compress the video. All the capture and compression are done by chips on the card. All the computer is doing is writing the compressed data stream to a file (and optionally displaying it).

[Cauptain]

Hi BOMOON,

You can do a test?

Download MIRILLIS ACTION, Turn on your PS3/CONSOLE, open WINTV and capture using ACTION "action desktop region"

If you can record at 60fps, you will have discovered the problem in your PC over your TV card.

This makes no sense. The Colossus is a hardware h.264 encoding card. It's not recording from the screen and it isn't using the CPU or GPU to compress the video. All the capture and compression are done by chips on the card. All the computer is doing is writing the compressed data stream to a file (and optionally displaying it).

I agree jagabo, but if the problem is hardware (HDD) he cannot capture at 60fps.

If he can, the problem is CPU and not "hardware/software".




Claudio

[BOMOON]

I agree jagabo, but if the problem is hardware (HDD) he cannot capture at 60fps.
If he can, the problem is CPU and not "hardware/software".
Claudio

I've already verified that I can capture at 60fps. This is apparently the "default" frame rate when I'm capturing at 720 X 480. It's actually 59.94 fps, progressive.

When I try to capture at 1080i, the frame rate automatically changes to 29.97 fps (makes sense, since it's interlaced).

The 720 X 480-59.94p captures are the ones that consistently work well. The 1920 X 1080-29.97i captures are the ones that "stutter".

[BOMOON]

It looks as though I'll be stuck with low-res captures for the time being. Essentially, I'm not much better off than I was with the Canopus SD captures.

Remind me -- which Canopus card are you referring to ? One that requires the no-longer-used AGP type slot ?

So, Canopus is gone and out of the game at this point: no more recent HD products from them, to compete with the others ?

The ADVC-1394, and SD capture card with composite and S-Video inputs. Mine is a PCIe X16 card.

Canopus products are made by "Grass Valley" these days. But to be honest, I haven't looked at any of their HD stuff since my one and only visit to the Grass Valley website, where I was put off by the high prices. Here's a link to the ADVC product line. The ADVC-1394 isn't there any more. The one HD device, the ADVC-HD50, lists for about $700.00.

Grass Valley Video Conversion Hardware

[BOMOON]

[QUOTE=jman98;2194535]

...
It seems most likely to me that either you're doing something wrong and not realizing it and thus not telling us or that your PC simply for some reason doesn't play nice with this card. This is starting to get into the territory where we would have to physically look at your system and watch what you do to probably have any chance of helping you. T
...
If I remember you told us that your hardware is pretty old and maybe there's actually something wrong with your hardware (ie. some kind of problem with your PCIe slot) that is causing the issue. If there's a problem specific to the PCIe slot, that would explain why the PC is OK in general but the card doesn't work well. But that's just a guess and could be wrong.

I agree.

I think that in order to try to reduce the variables as much as possible, I really ought to do a clean re-install of Windows 7 on a formatted hard drive.

There's only one PCIe x1 slot on the MB, so I can't swap the Colossus out to another slot - unless I can take out one of the PCIe X16 cards and plug the Colossus into the open slot. Is that possible? The way the card connector is keyed, it looks like the Colossus could be physically plugged into one end of a PCIe x16 slot.

[jagabo]

unless I can take out one of the PCIe X16 cards and plug the Colossus into the open slot. Is that possible?

Yes, you can do that.

I've already verified that I can capture at 60fps.

I think his point was to verify you could capture HD video at 60 fps, not SD video. But you're not capturing at any fps. The software is only reading a data stream from the card and writing it to a file, 20 Mbit/s worth of data, a trivial amount. The fact that that data comprises a video with a frame rate is immaterial.

[SHS]

720 X 480 30i or 30p usely you don't see 60p unless source was encode that way
1280x720 60p
1920 X 1080 30i with HD-PVR and Colossus which can't record 30p and it out video pass though only dose output 30i
1920 X 1080 30p with new HD-PVR 2 you still can't record 60p how ever the video pass though dose output 60p

[jman98]

SHS is quite correct.

My experience with the card is that it does something in what it records that makes it somehow report double its actual frame rate for SD captures. I used various programs to look at the source I recorded and they all reported 59.94 fps on my video. We had some discussion here and I came to the conclusion that I was actually getting 29.97i fps on my SD capture and the 59.94 was actually the number of FIELDS per second, not FRAMES per second.

[jagabo]

S-video and composite captures are always 29.97i or 25i. That's all that is ever transmitted over those cables. Of course, component and HDMI can carry both interlaced and progressive content.

[BOMOON]

S-video and composite captures are always 29.97i or 25i. That's all that is ever transmitted over those cables. Of course, component and HDMI can carry both interlaced and progressive content.

OK, I'm digesting all this new fps info to try to figure out what's going on.

RE composite, SVideo, component capturing: At this time I'm capturing solely via component video/analog audio, and doing nothing (I'm aware of) to play around with capture resolutions or frame rates. The source video drives everything. I've been capturing source video from programming that's always 720 X 480, mainly because that's the only resolution that's worked without "stutter" so far.

I think everyone should note that the resolution and fps info I'm reporting is coming to me via MediaInfo results for the captured TS files. As I've seen in the past, such MediaInfo reports can be inaccurate if any parameters change during the captures. MediaInfo seems to report the initial parameters only.

Also, for those 59.94 captures, MediaInfo has been reporting "Progressive" for the scan mode. Thus, when I said 720 X 480-59.94p, I was regurgitating what MediaInfo told me about the scan mode. I didn't mean to suggest that I had otherwise verified that, or that I knew what I was talking about when it comes to SD vs HD capturing (argh!).

On those occasions when I used AVS Video Converter 8 to try to get the TS files in a format that could be imported into Vegas Pro 11, I noticed that AVS didn't always report the same source video frame rates as MediaInfo. Unfortunately I didn't keep records of the differences and still don't know what to make of them. The only thing I can tell you is that I was doing 1080i captures when this happened.

As a check on those 720 X 480-59.94p captures, I pulled one of the files into the AVS Video Converter to see what it reported for the source video. Here's what it had to say about the video portion:

Video Codec: H.264/AVC (Advance Video Coding)
Resolution: 720 X 480 Pixels
Bit Rate: 20065 kbps
Frame Rate: 59.94 fps

What it doesn't say is whether or not this is progressive or interlaced video. I couldn't find anything in the advanced setup to indicate that, or anything else that might be related, like upper/lower field order.

The point is that it agrees with MediaInfo for the regarding the resolution and frame rate.

I'm going to go offline for a bit to do some card swapping with the Colossus and some of the other PCIe x16 cards. In addition, I'm going to remove the Canopus ADVC-1394 entirely. In the past I've been disabling it via the Device Manager to make sure it wasn't running interference somehow (even though nothing is connected to it). Since I know the Canopus works very reliably, I'll be starting with its vacated x16 slot for the Colossus.

Meanwhile, to re-examine what jman98 said:

It is extremely unlikely that 32 bit is your problem as we've had no posts in the past to suggest this but I have no way to test this as I only have 64 bit Win 7. Usually if anything has a problem it's 64 bit Windows and not 32 bit.
It seems most likely to me that either you're doing something wrong and not realizing it and thus not telling us or that your PC simply for some reason doesn't play nice with this card.

Yes, now that I think of it, I've left out some info that I didn't think was relevant. My house took a lightning strike last March (freak storm, actually hit a tree in the back yard and came into the house via the water pump). It took out some PC and A/V equipment, but not all, depending on the surge protection I guess.

In the Dimension 8300, which does not house the Colossus, only the Ethernet stuff was fried, plus one PCIe slot (the one that had a wireless LAN adapter in it). That included the onboard Ethernet adapter. Since then I've been accessing the internet via one of those USB/Ethernet adapters.

The Dimension 8400, which has the Colossus and Canopus, seemed to be completely unaffected. However, given the way the 8300 was hit, it could be that any PCIe slots I had not been using at the time were damaged, so I didn't notice at first.

The Colossus came along after the strike, fortunately for the card at least.

Well, it may all be moot. If the Colossus doesn't work in the slot that now has the Canopus, I think we can rule out a damaged slot. We'll see.

Once again I thank all of you for the beaucoup information on video capture. It's been very frustrating because the unknowns are making it difficult for me to learn about video capture in any kind of structured manner - too haphazard for me to make much sense of it, especially when it comes to differing frame rate reports, scan modes, and now the difference between FIELDS and FRAMES. I have to keep the latter in mind with these 59.94 "progressive" captures.

I'll report back as soon as I'm done with the card swapping exercise.

[jagabo]

Component video could be interlaced or progressive (30p or 60p), depending on the device putting out the signal.

Interlaced video is transmitted as fields. One field (every other scanline of the screen) every 1/60 second. When capture devices capture interlaced video they capture two successive fields and weave them together into a frame. So 60 fields per second becomes 30 interlaced frames per second, traditionally called "30i". The problem with nomenclature started when some marketing genius started using the term 60i when what he meant was 30i -- because it sounded twice as good (and probably because he was clueless). Then a few programs started marking to 30i video files as 60i. So now there is some confusion about what frame rate values really mean. Some players will see the label 60i and try to play the video at double speed, 120 fields per second or 60 frames per second.

[BOMOON]

I'm SOL. It turns out that the Dimension 8400 only has one PCIe X16 slot, which is used by the graphics card. The other slots are PCI (3 slots) and PCIe X1 (1 slot).

The 8400 does not have integrated video. I have to use that slot for the graphics card. If I want to try the Colossus in that x16 slot, I'd have to find a PCI video card for one of the spare slots. I don't have one of those at the moment. So I can't try the Colossus in another slot.

I'm giving up on the Colossus with this PC. Everywhere I turn to try to debug the problem, I get shut down. Since I can only capture in SD with it, I'm going back to the Canopus, a proven performer compared to this Hauppauge piece of junk.

I should have trusted my first instincts back when I discovered that the files captured by this card were incompatible with all of the video editors on my system - especially Vegas. If I had realized then that the card was crap in a Dimension 8400, I could have returned it for a full refund. Now I'm far outside the 30-day full refund period given to me by Amazon.

I'm off to explore other options for HD capture, including a new system. Even with a new system, however, I doubt I'll trust Hauppauge cards of any kind.

Thanks to all for your help, I appreciate your patience in trying to debug this problem.

[BOMOON]

BTW I never did manage to get a clear explanation of how the VLC Media Player could be used with the Colossus to capture video on Windows OS platform. What I saw in this forum suggested that the codecs that came with the VLC player were the important things, but I never saw any advantage in anything I was trying to do after I had installed VLC.

As far as capturing video using the Colossus with "VLC Stream" is concerned, I could never get that working. I set up the Colossus as the capture device in VLC, enabled stream capture, and got the old "cannot recognize capture device" message.

Man, I just went around the horn with NextPVR and XMBC, based on what I saw in some forum postings on the Hauppauge UK forum. Some of the users there said they had solved problems with freeze-ups during XBOX recordings by using NextPVR as the capturing program.

Good grief. NextPVR is.... well, let's just say it's a much bigger load than ArcSoft Showbiz.

[jagabo]

VLC only works with capture devices that output uncompressed video. The Colossus outputs video that's already h.264 compressed. Even if you could get VLC to capture from the device you would be decompressing the h.264 video then recompressing it again. That would put much more strain on your computer and needlessly lose quality. The whole point of using a hardware encoding capture device like the Colossus is to have the device do the compression, not the CPU in the computer. You're definitely not going to get real-time software h.264 encoding on a P4.

By the way, you never answered my question about how much CPU usage you're seeing while capturing (use Task Manager). It would be useful to see the different CPU usages when capturing SD and HD, and with/without display.

[jman98]

I remain completely unconvinced that the Colossus is a "piece of junk". I'm going to repeat what I said earlier in this thread, although I'm too lazy to look it up and use the same words. I've seen reviews on Amazon bitching about the card, but I have the impression that the unhappy users do not know what they are doing. This card works very well for a lot of us here. You've admitted that your PCs are old AND quite possibly damaged from a lightning strike, but if you want to blame the card that's your business. I just don't agree with you. If you want to use hardware that's 5 years old, that's your business too, but don't expect to be an HD video power user on such equipment. What you are doing is kind of like trying to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco via bicycle and then getting mad at the people in cars who do it much quicker.

[jagabo]

Obviously, the Colossus isn't a piece of junk. BOMOON is trying to run it on a hopelessly outdated, and possibly damaged, computer and has insufficient experience to deal with the resulting issues.

[Tom Saurus]

I have been thinking about purchasing this card at some point in the future. I am reading about BOMOON's difficulties and it may boil down to him having too old of a computer. The TBC is what attracts me to this Hauppauge Colossus and I asked a question about that and was pleased to read that it helps with capturing VHS tapes. I updated my computer specs to the specs for my HP i5 computer. With the specs that I have for my computer would I have any problem with this device. I bought a 2 TB hard drive USB drive and moved a lot of files over to it yesterday and I have about 600mb free on my hard drive now. I have a Hauppauge USB HD-PVR that I am thinking of trying out, but I don't want to steal the thread away from discussing this device. I just thought other than the TBC there are a lot of similarities and I could gauge what is possible with the capture device and software. Thanks in advance for any advice. Also if I have hijacked or stolen the thread I didn't intend to and I apologize.

[Seeker47]

I have a Hauppauge USB HD-PVR that I am thinking of trying out, but I don't want to steal the thread away from discussing this device. I just thought other than the TBC there are a lot of similarities and I could gauge what is possible with the capture device and software. Thanks in advance for any advice. Also if I have hijacked or stolen the thread I didn't intend to and I apologize.

No, I think that if you (or anyone else) wants to compare operational functionality of the two, this would be useful and relevant info. Good for a few posts, anyway. If it started to take over the thread though, it should probably THEN be split off into it's own thread. [I believe they also market a standalone box, which may be the one you are referring to, but -- either way -- it would be an external vs. internal device comparison. The differences are probably going to involve throughput, since I doubt we are talking about USB-3 here.]

[jagabo]

As I mentioned before, I have the original USB 2 Hauppauge HD PVR model 01212. I don't currently have it set up so I can't give you exact numbers. But as I recall, when it was capturing with the display disabled CPU usage was down around 1 or 2 percent on a dual core CPU (a Core 2 Duo E6300 I think it was).

[Cauptain]

After some tests...New device ROXIO HD (USB 2.0/H264) >>>>>>>>> Hauppage Colossus. For games.



Claudio

[jagabo]

The Roxio Game Capture HD Pro requires at least a dual core CPU according to their web site:

http://www.roxio.com/enu/upgrade_center/game-capture/sys-req.html

[BOMOON]

What you are doing is kind of like trying to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco via bicycle and then getting mad at the people in cars who do it much quicker.

Obviously, the Colossus isn't a piece of junk. BOMOON is trying to run it on a hopelessly outdated, and possibly damaged, computer and has insufficient experience to deal with the resulting issues.

Yeah, I admit that my temper was short last night after discovering that I had run out of options with the expansion slots. I'm sure as many of you have reported that the card works fine in the newer, multi-core machines, whether they're 32 or 64 bit.

However, I never played the nasty with anyone here - just with the card, and myself. Keep in mind that I was always quick to mention my own inexperience and stupidity as I waded through this problem.

But you are right about the situation as a whole. In my case there's a temper issue on top of everything else, but at least when that resolves, I'm ready to take advice again.

I need to look at new systems. Obviously if I do that, I'd be crazy not to try the Colossus in a new system once I get it.

Looks as though it'll have to be something home-grown, since Dell and other desktops these days tend to be moving towards the all-in-one design and don't have a lot of expansion slots. I have a bunch of helpful product links for MB's in this thread, the HDMI capture thread, and a few other forums here and there. Also I have descriptions of the systems you guys have been using successfully with this card.

There. Now that I've greased the pan a little, gimme some money so I can do this!

Alan Mintaka

[BOMOON]

By the way, you never answered my question about how much CPU usage you're seeing while capturing (use Task Manager). It would be useful to see the different CPU usages when capturing SD and HD, and with/without display.

I got as far as playing with the priorities of the three programs - Hauppauge TV Server, CaptureColossus, and WinTV - in trying to answer that question, but got diverted by other problems and didn't get a chance to write down the numbers for different types of capture.

However I can tell you that I goosed the priorities for all three programs to High, and that they sat at the top of the CPU usage column in the Task Manager. WinTV was always first in the list, followed by the other two which continuously changed positions for 2nd and 3rd place.

At the time, no AV or Firewall programs were running and I was offline.

In addition to all that, I keep the count of running processes on that machine as low as possible. That means disabling the Task Manager entirely (even though I've manually disabled many of the services and processes in there already), clearing all other applications out of memory, doing anything else a Windows 7 Home Premium end-user can think of to keep anything unwanted from running.

The only thing left to consider (that I knew about) was to change those program priorities to Real-Time. However I know from past experience that doing so doesn't buy you much in a Windows OS. If some of the system interrupts aren't serviced when they're supposed to be, all hell breaks loose. Also, sometimes the only way to effect program control for those real-time apps is to physically turn off the PC. Given the intense Disk I/O of these capturing programs, that's not a good idea.

So as far as user control of CPU usage is concerned, I did what I could to goose it for those apps - I just didn't write down the numbers to report to you.

RE with/without display: the only way to capture without preview in WinTV turned out to be via the Pause button, which one of you told me about (can't remember who now, could have been you). This pauses the preview video but not the capturing (otherwise there is no "disable preview" option in WinTV). I tried this while I was playing with the program priorities.

The results: no change in capture quality. 720 X 480 caps look and sound OK, 1080i caps "gang all a-stutter", as John Donne would have said if he had REAL problems to write poems about.

Not John Donne,
Alan Mintaka

[jagabo]

Priorities have to do with scheduling, not directly with how much CPU time a process gets. Only when multiple programs are requesting more than 100 percent of CPU time do priorities come into play -- the higher the priority the more CPU time the process gets. Juggling priorities isn't likely to help your problem.

The issue is how much CPU time was being consumed while capturing at the different resolutions, with and without the display. That would provide hints about where the problem is.