Hauppauge WinTV-PVR Hardware MPEG2 Capture card any good???

[HAGGARD]

Hi,

I'm wondering if the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR Hardware MPEG2 Capture card is good in encoding to MPEG2...
Till now im using a 'standard' BT878 capture card to capture video to AVI (BIGGGGG) and encode to MPEG2 with TMPGEnc (SLOOOOOOW) but with excellent results!!!!
I want to know if the quality of the MPEG2 coded video is as great as with TMPGEnc??? And if there are disadvantages with that card (e.g. not working with virtualdub or something like that...)
Also want to know what MPEG Encoderchip is seated on that card....

Thanks....

'HAG

p.s. If U don't know what i'm talking about, check: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/wintvpvr_datasheet.htm

[DVWannaB]

When you get this card loaded and for many people thats a big IF!!!!, the card does a real good job. This is an overall (in my opinion) a very good capture card, but there are many drawbacks in my opinion.

First it is HELL to install and get going. Check the Capture Crad section of this site. There are numerous. If you are handy with the computer and dont mind tweaking and re-tweaking and re-tweaking again, then go for it. To be fair though, not everyone has had this problem. Based on responses so far, there are more install problems than there are smooth ones.

In my opinion, based on my experiences with this card (9 months), I would say since I am not a "techie", but know enough to be dangerous with handling a computer, I would say I would have used a different card than this one. The reason is I really dont have a lot of time trying to play with software or hardware to get it to work. I want to plug it in and go. For that reason, if I could choose another product, in hind-sight, I would.

My 2 cents worth. Good luck.

[SHS]

WinTV-PVR 250/350 is much better then older WinTV-PVR PCI

[cz9h3d]

Installed my PVR-250 last week with zero problems - I was concerned after reading over the posts, but had not troubles. My system is homebuilt (845pe chipset, 2.53GHz) but no overclocking or anything fancy. In my limited use I'm pretty happy with the results! I've burnt captures from the tuner to DVD and they look like the original (TV quality of course).

[txpharoah]

ATI ALL IN WONDER CARDS are another option, and they incorporate full MPEG2 hardware encoding based off the Ligos GoMotion realtime MPEG processor.

I am aware that Hauppauge cards do have a high rate of return at the local Fry's electronics store. This is an item I only used once or twice, and was not impressed by its ease of use.

[SHS]

txpharoah ATI ALL IN WONDER card are not full blowing hardware encoder.
Some thing eles ATI ALL IN WONDER card dosen't have Linux support for best TV app out there MythTV.
Some of us have switch to SageTV for the Integrated Programming Guide with Intelligent Recording and Scheduling and lot more and best all Multiple tuner support and Network is in the work to now cool.

[txpharoah]

txpharoah ATI ALL IN WONDER card are not full blowing hardware encoder.

The ATI card most certainly does have hardware MPEG encoding, though not as sophisticated as the $1K+ cards.

And Linux is a OS that has a VERY small minority of users. But I congratulate you on learning it. Not easy even for the most sophisticated Windows/Mac user. Glad you found a program/card that worked for you.

[SHS]

Really then I guest you better tell Matthew over at AnandTech who did review of ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro that he wrong then.
Note High CPU utilization where WinTV-PVR 250 has 0% CPU utilization MAXout at 12MBit/s and MAXout 384KBit/s Audio and not droping one frame palying UT 2003 at sametime let see try that.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1740&p=2
All other review out need lean a thing or two from AnandTech they only talk how it run you games they don't even talk about MPEG encoding at all.
Linux not that hard lean it just diff that all.
3 yrs I would have agree with you on VERY small minority of users but that not case now it growing fast every day I guest somebody forgot tell that Mac user OSX that is, They run on top FreeBSD not all that much diff from Linux.

[CubDukat]

Currently, the AIW Radeon 9700/9800 are the only cards that ATI advertises as using the Cobra engine for hardware encoding, and while the Cobra engine is an integrated part of the Theater 200 chip which can also be found in the AIW VE PCI card and the upcoming AIW 9000 Pro, it may not be active.

I have e-mailed ATI about this, as my AIW 8500DV is a complete CPU hog when you activate motion compensation--and it desperately needs it since the 8500DV's tuner is a POS--but they have not answered back. So the best thing I could do is get out of the P3/VIA motherboard combo I'm in now and into something more current--like a P4/i845PE-based solution.

Or I could always plunk down $400 for the AIW 9700, but that's way too much card for me right now, but I've heard so many horror stories about the PVR250 with XP--and Hauppauge products in general--that I'll bie the bullet for right now.

[hotwings]

I have the wintv pvr 250 and I run it on winxp pro and it has been good to me. I record shows, (like the whole season of Alias), then do divx conversions for storage with excellent a/v synch. Now I must say that the only real problems I had were with different versions of the drivers which tried to add more functionality and performance, but sometimes messed with the a/v synch when converting to Divx (a/v synch is always fine in mpeg2 or 1, its just the conversions which can suffer due to loss of mpeg audio timecode). Once I found the right set of drivers I was very happy. One problem with the wintv and automated recordings is that it doesn't have a built in function to minimize/freeze the program while it is recording, that being said I found a good free scripting program which does just that. So when recordings are going on I can even burn dvds (which is heavily processor intensive) without skipping a beat (keep in mind that the picture image is frozen, but the recording is still active, this lowers cpu usage to less than 4%).

You can also find good communities to help out with some of the technical issues, I know for one that SHS is very helpful on the pvr message boards.

One issue I do have with the pvr is that I wish that the tuner could be a little bit better. I had a creative videoblaster digital vcr and it had a nice tuner but was a piece of crap for converting to other formats and editing. The pvrs tuner is good, but could be better. If you have a good cable source, then you can get really great results and good flexibility, MPEG1 and MPEG2. One trick I have used at times (since my cable source isn't so great ala digital cable) is to use the external input to attach another tv tuning device's output (I have used a vcr on occasion, and for what you get in noise reduction, you lose in resolution, so I am still searching for a better device for certain channels on my crappy cable service) to the pvr and that also has the potential to produce great results, albeit without the ability to schedule recordings (as far as I know, you can't schedule recordings for the external inputs, SHS should know more about this though). Sorry for rambling, but the PVR in my estimation is great as an mpeg encoder, just make sure you have a good source.

[hotwings]

Also if you would like I could post small snippets hosted via ftp of the quality of some of my recordings in mpeg 1, 2, and conversions to divx. just let me know.. I'll be checking the boards from time to time.

[rixware]

The WinTV PVR-250 is an excellent card for capturing direct to MPEG2. I've read that some folks have had problems with installation, but unlike some other cards, this seems to affect a minority of the customers. My install went absolutely flawlessly (Gateway PIII-600), and all of the captures have been of an amazingly high quality.

There is still an issue with the card which you may want to consider: If you intend to use the captured files to create DVDs, you may encounter the dreaded audio sync problems. Your files will play perfectly on your system, but as soon as an authoring program (virtually ANY authoring program) gets hold of them, the demux will introduce sync problems due to audio PTS errors in the captured files. This is well documented over on the SHS board (http://www.shspvr.com/forum).

Not every capture has this problem, and there are a few workarounds, but it is something to consider.

+

[hotwings]

rixware is absolutely right. I don't do much burning straight to dvd so I didn't think to mention it, but there have been some occasions where the a/v goes out of synch after authoring. but I've done maybe at most 4 burns. So i'm off to play around with this right now actually..

[jdizzy40]

I have a Win PVR-350. I tried it on 4 systems I built. MSI and Gigabyte MBs. Each time it would kill my sound card and optical drives. Thus it has sat in a box out of view. Expensive test for me. No I would not recommend unless they have tested it on your MoBo. I personally don't like thier software and player either. I use WIN DVR instead. I'm happy with my ATI AIW 8500DV and AIW 9700 Pro and the I/O Magic PC PVR's. Guide Plus- ATI Supported EPG (Electronic Programming Guide) is fine for me. I also use Titan TV. Good Luck!

[thxkid]

I had the older PVR for over 2 years now and have captured and burned, VCDs, SVCDs and DVD+R's and with PERFECT results, its a great card and would not ever trade down to anything else - like ATI.
A friend of mine just got the PVR 250 and after emailing and talking to him on the phone and getting him setup with the special manual setting regedits I have for these cards his is working perfect and he burning DVD's with MF2 using a Sony 500ax without a prob and he his more than pleased with the quality. You have to get the manual regedit hacks from happauge german web site, these allow you to go in and set everything on the card by hand, its great for tweaking up the video. without them its gonna be a headache.

[HAGGARD]

Thanks for all the answers...

But no-one answered the question what kind of encoderchip is seated on this card...
Please let me know, so I can check the specs of this chip myself...
I'm not very confinced so far....

'HAG

[SHS]

Depned on which PVR 250 you end up with it could have iCompression iTVC15 or it also know as Conexant CX23415/16.
If you go to SHSPVR.com click on Review under Comparison of the WinTV-PVR.
Rigth now SHSPVR forum is down but soon we get new server the forum will be back online which I hope is today.

[hotwings]

For anyone interested and having trouble authoring. This method has worked for me so far. I use pvastrumento to build a new mpeg2 program stream file with the default settings, then I demux this file and author with an authoring program. So far so good, audio synch is preserved and I didn't have to screw around with mpeg2vcr.