Hauppauge PVR 250

[red lion]

Ok this will probably be a shot in the dark but here goes...
I purchased a Hauppauge PVR 250 which is a hardware encoder and it does great with vhs to dvd or tv to dvd but can it be used to encode other stuff ie divx\xvid etc so i dont have to use software like TMPGEnc and it would also let the computer free when encoding...

[drjtech]

No.

[yoda313]

Hello,

Here's an option:

REAL TIME CAPTURE FROM ANOTHER COMPTUER

If you have a laptop or another desktop that plays divx smoothly you can hook that video out to your input on the hauppauge Will work beautifully

Though of course it won't be any better than the source you record from

Kevin

[reboot]

Sneaky trick Yoda...how about capturing over a LAN? Any ideas for that?


(I'm kidding) Nice trick about using a second computer though. I happen to have 5 laying around here. What sort of adapter would I need from SVGA out to? or you mean TVout? What about audio?

[yoda313]

Sneaky trick Yoda...how about capturing over a LAN? Any ideas for that?


(I'm kidding) Nice trick about using a second computer though. I happen to have 5 laying around here. What sort of adapter would I need from SVGA out to? or you mean TVout? What about audio?

Hello,

Thanks

As long as your other computer has a svideo output and your capture card has a svideo in jack just hook the two together (or convert where necessary).

As for the audio the simplest method would be to get a single pronged male to male mini headphone jack link cable to go from soundcard out to capture card audio in. You'll lose any digital audio in this process but you'll still get pro logic if it was recorded in dolby digital

Of course you could just dub the video and rip out the ac3 track and merge that with your new video file in tmpgenc dvd author or another authoring program - though you may get synch issues if you wish to keep the ac3 because now you'll have different start and stop times from the manual recording

Kevin

[reboot]

I'm gonna test this tomorrow.
S-vid out, to S-vid in.
(Which works really well, because my wifey stole the GeForce for her games, and I end up with the Radeon 7000 pci)
I'll simply rip audio, transcode in ffmpeggui, and transfer it over the LAN.
I'll do my end muxing in DVDLab.
Just let the card do the video encoding.
This is gonna be fun!
I wonder just how good the quality will be, compared to a quick CQ 70 pass in tmpgenc, or MC?

[yoda313]

Hello,

This is gonna be fun!

ENJOY

I wonder just how good the quality will be, compared to a quick CQ 70 pass in tmpgenc, or MC?

Are you encoding to avi or to mpg?????

For starters why don't you encode at EXACTLY the same bitrate as the divx video itself. THEORETICALLY it should be EXACTLY the same as the source material. Of course you have to account for the capture card itself and any signal loss over the video cable... and whether or not Mars is in retrograde... (ok maybe its not that complicated! ).

Let us know how your test goes

Kevin

[reboot]

Directly to mpeg via the card.
I'll compare an I frame from the capture to the same divx video, at the same settings as the capture (bitrate), in Tmpgenc, Mainconcept, and Canopus Procoder (and maybe the other half dozen encoders I have).

[junkmalle]

Hello,

Here's an option:

REAL TIME CAPTURE FROM ANOTHER COMPTUER

If you have a laptop or another desktop that plays divx smoothly you can hook that video out to your input on the hauppauge Will work beautifully

If your computer has clean TV out (composite or s-video) you can play the Divx video and capture with the PVR-250 at the same time! You'll probably want to disable WinTV2000's realtime display (registry hack) though (so it takes almost no CPU cycles). It might work better with the AVI file on one drive and capturing to another.

I just tried it. WinTV2000 steals the computer's video output away from the media player so I had to use WinTVCap (a command line capture program for the PVR-250). It worked!

I used Windows Media Player to play a video to my old Matrox Millennium eTV card's TV output (using the mode where only the player's video is goes to the TV output). I captured the video on the PVR-250 with WinTVCap, on the same computer. I used the composite connections because my s-video connections are hard to get to.

[harrisonford]

Curious Question, if you had a optical link to and from a playback source to a record source, you should and could keep your AC3 audio in a DVD?

Just asking, my computer has AC3 on a ASUS P4800SE to a dual Xeon 2 gigs of RAM and raid etc ....... would capture both video in and audio,

sync and re-edit later?

[yoda313]

Hello,

Here's an option:

REAL TIME CAPTURE FROM ANOTHER COMPTUER

If you have a laptop or another desktop that plays divx smoothly you can hook that video out to your input on the hauppauge Will work beautifully

If your computer has clean TV out (composite or s-video) you can play the Divx video and capture with the PVR-250 at the same time! You'll probably want to disable WinTV2000's realtime display (registry hack) though (so it takes almost no CPU cycles). It might work better with the AVI file on one drive and capturing to another.

I just tried it. WinTV2000 steals the computer's video output away from the media player so I had to use WinTVCap (a command line capture program for the PVR-250). It worked!

I used Windows Media Player to play a video to my old Matrox Millennium eTV card's TV output (using the mode where only the player's video is goes to the TV output). I captured the video on the PVR-250 with WinTVCap, on the same computer. I used the composite connections because my s-video connections are hard to get to.

Hello,

SWEET!!! You one up-d my own idea!!!

Curious Question, if you had a optical link to and from a playback source to a record source, you should and could keep your AC3 audio in a DVD?

I don't see why not......

Kevin

[junkmalle]

Yoda, The single computer play/record worked but I wouldn't really recommend the technique. Simply converting in software would be much cleaner and, depending on the software, could even be faster.

[junkmalle]

Curious Question, if you had a optical link to and from a playback source to a record source, you should and could keep your AC3 audio in a DVD?

In theory yes, but in reality I don't think there is any consumer level hardware and software support for this.

[yoda313]

Yoda, The single computer play/record worked but I wouldn't really recommend the technique. Simply converting in software would be much cleaner and, depending on the software, could even be faster.

Hello,

Yeah probably true - and that wincap program kept telling me it was missing an ini file when I tried it to record!

Kevin

[junkmalle]

Yoda, The single computer play/record worked but I wouldn't really recommend the technique. Simply converting in software would be much cleaner and, depending on the software, could even be faster.

Hello,

Yeah probably true - and that wincap program kept telling me it was missing an ini file when I tried it to record!

Kevin

Did you run the "register.bat" file first?

Then WinTVCap needs a bunch of parameters on the command line to tell it what to do. See the htm file for details. A command line like:

wintvcap -c254 -minutes:1 -profile:TWELVE -startr:.\test.mpg

tells it to record channel 254 (composite input), for one minute using the TWELVE Mb/s setting, and save the file as test.mpg in the current folder.

[yoda313]

Hello,

Oh ok thanks. I may try that later

Kevin

[red lion]

sorry for being so long in replying what i was thinking was hooking my graphics card (tv\video out) into my capture card (Hauppauge PVR 250 )
but you have now gave me a few ideas to try and please anyone who is trying this report back with how it all went..

[junkmalle]

i was thinking was hooking my graphics card (tv\video out) into my capture card (Hauppauge PVR 250 )... (so i dont have to use software like TMPGEnc and it would also let the computer free when encoding...)

That's exactly what I did. But the technique doesn't really mean you can still use your computer for other things at the same time. The playback will stutter when the CPU/graphics card is busy, hence the recording via the PVR will stutter. At least you won't lose A/V sync.

Other issues:

It's only realtime -- an hour of video will take you an hour to "convert". You can pretty much do that in software (depending on how fast your computer is) without any stuttering. TMPGEnc is notoriously slow. Most other MPEG encoders are twice as fast. If you run TEMPGEnc (or any other encoder) at low priority it won't interfere with whatever else you do on the computer.

You're prone to color shifts unless you perfectly calibrate your graphics cards output and the PVR's input. A software conversion avoids this problem.

The sharpness of the picture can decrease from the digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion. Again software would avoid this problem.

[red lion]

Thanks i will stick to software then but you are correct about TMPGEnc being slow and it dont let you convert if everything is not how it wants (ie gop and bitrate and resolution) I had a video with the GOP wrong and the resolution and bitrate all wrong and TMPGEnc would not let me ignore so i dropped the file in dvdsanta and no problems at all not even scync issues which i believe to be commom in that program..
but this is off topic so i will just say thanks to all replys
btw the Hauppauge PVR 250 is a good bit of gear to get