good PVR for Hauppagge WinTV

[brendt]

I have a Hauppagge WinTV card that I got several months ago, and have been using it a lot. The software that comes with it locks up the PC after about 4 seconds, so it's worthless. (I even tried installing other drivers, and that made the situation worse.)

I started using VirtualVCR (always start with free stuff ), and the VVCR Scheduler. It's been great, except that it doesn't stop VVCR at the end of the program it is recording, and it just errors out if it is running already and tries to start another recording. Also, there's no way to change channels mid-stream (e.g. I want to record channel 3 from 9-10 and then channel 46 from 10-11).

I recently bought Nero 6 Ultra Edition (for other reasons) but it's record capabilities seem lame. If I am missing something and there's a great PVR in there somewhere, let me know.

Otherwise, what I need are the following abilities/functions:
* program PC to record a show, including specficiation of channel #
* stop PVR software when recording is done
* program to record back-to-back shows on different channels

"Free" is not a requirement here, though of course, it'd be nice.

I have seen a lot of software here, and am prepared to try each out, but if anyone can say "try this first; I like it", that'd be great!

Thanks
Brendt

[shhas]

Check out www.sage.tv

The new version of Sage rocks. I higly recommend a dedicated PC for the PVR task.

[brendt]

That looks good except it appears to require a card with MPEG2 encoding capabilities. I've got a regular old WinTV card.

Any other suggestions?

[SatStorm]

You are NTSC, so I can't advice you mainconcept PVR.

Maybe winDVR or PowerVCR

There is also some virtualdub schedjulers out there, but won't work if you use wdm drivers for channel switching (btwincap rarelly is able to detect and handle the tuner...)

[Ziffelpig]

If your using a P4 with the Hyper-Threading Technology it needs to be disabled for the PVR-250. I had the exact same problem only it was random, sometimes a half hour sometimes in the first minute. They explain how to disable this feature at the card on the hauppage website.
http://www.hauppage.com/pages/support_faq_pvr250-350.html