Want to replace Hauppauge pvr 250, what should I get?

[heman28]

Hello I am looking to replace soon my 4 year old computer with something up to date and am looking for something with Windows Vista Home Premium. I have a Hauppauge Win TV Pvr 250 that I have used and have been very happy with it but I dont know if it will work with the newer stuff such as vista etc. I looked for updates and the drivers are a couple of years old etc. I am looking for most up to date as I can get. I mostly use it for putting vhs to dvd sometimes when I decide to use it but I looked at some of the Hauppauge HVR series and noticed they dont seem to have the yellow rca video input on them just the S-Video for comosite hookup at least that what it says on the picture of some. I like to keep the same type of connection through my hoopups and not go from rca to s-video cause of the issues you get with that. Basically that is all I use it for. Not for tv recordings just the occasional vhs to dvd transfer. Does anyone have a recommendation and experience with the HVR series of cards? And if so what one would pretty much be like the pvr 250 but newer? Thanks
Eric

[hudsonf]

I'm using a Hauppauge Pvr 250 and a Hauppauge PVR USB2 on my Vista system with no problems.

[Forum Troll]

I am in the same situation. I have the PVR 250. My main reason for keeping it is to convert VHS tapes for people, as it ignores macrovision. I would like a card that does the same thing, but that can capture in anamorphic 16x9 format, like an HD channel. Do the newer model Hauppauge cards do this?

[thecoalman]

Can't you just set the source device to not letterbox it? Then author as 16:9. I only have 4:3 TV but if for example if I wanted to capture a 16:9 DVD with my Canopus I'd only have to set the DVD player to full screen display. It's going to look stretched on the TV but the Canopus is getting the full frame. I can set the 16:9 flag in the capture program I have, author a 16:9 DVD, no change from source to capture except whatever loss in quality.

Even if you cannot set the 16:9 flag in your capture program you can change it during authoring and/or using something like restream .

[SHS]

All PVR and HVR ignores MacroVision and CGMS-A just not in MCE
You could alway order this and yes it also works on HVR model to.
http://registration.hauppauge.com/webstore/accessories2.asp?product=av_cable

[Forum Troll]

Here's what I am trying to do. I have a Comcast HD cable box. I have connected it to the PVR250 via s-video. The video is a 16x9 high-definition movie. When I capture with the wintv2000 program, the 16x9 image is downgraded to being letterboxed inside a 4:3 frame. Basically, the source coming from the cable box is HD anamorphic video:



but the capture produced by wintv2000 ends up letterboxed like this:



How can I get my captures to be anamorphic 16x9 like the original, and not letterboxed like I get now? Is there some setting in the wintv2000 i need to change? Or maybe a new version? Or do I just need a new model of PVR?

[SHS]

Forum Troll
Frist of all WinTV2000 nor the dose the PVR/HVR Hardware MPEG Encoder downgraded to letterboxed inside a 4:3 frame your cable box dose that automatic when using the S-Video/Composite output when recoding from HD channel and do keep mind even if you are recording from SD channel the broadcast is still letterboxed just like what see on a reg 4:3 TV set and just like all DVD they are recoding in 4:3 frame size, how ever that depend on the dvd, cable, atsc or sat stream which may have the embeded 16:9 flag in order for your 16:9 TV set to display it in widescreen which I belive know as automatic "zoom or stretched to fit" mode for the correcting the size which is not always 100%, so if you want ture 16:9 you have you upgrade Cable HD, Sat HD, ATSC, Blu-Ray or HD-DVD format which have min display format 1280x720 or higher.

You need used tools like DVD Patcher in order change the Aspect Ratio flag from 4:3 to 16:9

How ever there always the upcoming Hauppauge HD PVR

The HD PVR can connect to high definition cable TV or satellite TV set top box receivers, and uses it’s on-board H.264 hardware encoder to record high definition TV programs in an ISO standard HD H.264 AVC format in real time. The connections to the set top boxes are made via component cables, also referred to as ‘YPrPb’ or the red/blue/green connectors on HD set top boxes. The HD PVR includes a video player application which allows the recorded TV programs to be played back on a PC screen.

To enable automatic recording of TV programs, the HD PVR recorder includes Hauppauge’s IR Blaster, which controls the channels on most popular cable and satellite TV set top boxes in North America and Europe, and will allow users to schedule the recording of their HD programs. The IR Blaster is also used on Hauppauge’s WinTV-PVR-150 and WinTV-HVR-1600 TV receivers.

In addition to high definition ISO standard H.264 recordings, the Hauppauge HD PVR can also create AVCHD recordings, which is the format used on Blu-ray high definition players. As part of the software applications which will be shipped with Hauppauge’s HD encoder, a DVD burning application will be provided which can take AVCHD formatted recordings and burn them onto a conventional DVD disc. These discs can then be played in Blu-ray DVD players. About 2 hours of Blu-ray HD content can be recorded on a 4.7 GByte DVD disk.

And price is around $250 from what I heard

There also maybe a SageTV HD PVR but nothing is know about it and not the Hauppauge HD PVR far I know of.

[Forum Troll]

An interesting sideline.. I looked on the back of my Comcast Motorola HD receiver, and noticed some firewire ports. Out of curiosity, i connected my laptop to the receiver with a firewire cable, and to my amazement, windows recognized it! I found some drivers online, and now I am able to capture most of the channels (apparently Comcast has enabled the C5 encryption or whatever they call it on some of the channels, so those ca't be captured), in their pure MPEG-2 transport stream. While not the result I started out looking for, it is a welcome step forward.

[FulciLives]

An interesting sideline.. I looked on the back of my Comcast Motorola HD receiver, and noticed some firewire ports. Out of curiosity, i connected my laptop to the receiver with a firewire cable, and to my amazement, windows recognized it! I found some drivers online, and now I am able to capture most of the channels (apparently Comcast has enabled the C5 encryption or whatever they call it on some of the channels, so those ca't be captured), in their pure MPEG-2 transport stream. While not the result I started out looking for, it is a welcome step forward.

Never tried this myself but I've heard it works well for channels that are not encrypted such as the "local" channels i.e., ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX etc.

Pretty much everything else is supposed to be copy protected though including pay-per-view and on-demand stuff.

My cable box and computer are in different rooms and I just never felt like dragging one to the other to try this

BTW I did look into the Samsung OTA set top HDTV receiver and apparently it can decode to SDTV (480i) and retain 16x9 but again you can only record from non-encrypted channels plus I think it costs at least $200 or more as I recall.

Probably better to just get a stand alone DVD recorder with a OTA HDTV tuner as that will also convert HDTV to 480i 16x9 ... or ... just do it via FireWire like you discovered.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[jman98]

Hello I am looking to replace soon my 4 year old computer with something up to date and am looking for something with Windows Vista Home Premium. I have a Hauppauge Win TV Pvr 250 that I have used and have been very happy with it but I dont know if it will work with the newer stuff such as vista etc.

I work in IT for a living. I've seen Vista. My company has NO PLANS OF ANY KIND to "upgrade" (ha ha ha - what a joke) to Vista. I'd love to know what sort of foolish reasoning you have where you actually think that running Vista is a good thing. Let's see... you currently have a totally working solution which you want to replace with the biggest piece of s___ OS that Microsoft has ever produced, which is infamous for NOT working with many devices. Good luck with that buddy.

Let me tell you a Vista story. A friend of mine bought a laptop pre-installed with Vista. It only had 512 MB of memory so Vista ran like crap. The laptop was unusable (Vista is a memory hog). He bought a 1 GB memory module for his laptop. He bought the right module for the laptop. He put it in the right slot on the laptop. Once he did this, the laptop NEVER again booted. It got a permanent error that prevented booting. He brought the laptop to me to see if I could fix it. I tried everything - removing the new memory, changing the slots for the memory - nothing worked. Even putting the laptop back exactly the way it was did not fix the problem. His Vista restore disc refused to overwrite the existing installation. I booted from a Linux CD and used that to wipe his disk partition so the hard disk could not boot at all. I installed the new 1 GB module and booted the PC from the restore disc which now reinstalled everything. It works like a champ. So yes, I certainly think that you if are an idiot that you should run out right now and buy this wonderful Vista from Microsoft and it will surely make your life a million times better than it is now with something that totally works for you as we all know that it's much much more fun to buy something that may not work at all for reasons you will never, ever understand.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but seriously you've been warned and if you ignore this and foolishly buy Vista anyway because you somehow think it will be better than what you have now, you deserve what you get.