PVR 350 Questions

[kosekjm]

Hi all,

I've been looking at getting a video capture card to transfer a few home movies to DVD and maybe start playing around with PVR stuff. I think that I'm pretty well sold on the Hauppage PVR-350, but had a few questions that I hope somebody out there may know the answers for. (Or maybe reasons to avoid this card and buy something else?)

1. On all of the pictures for this card, I see two RF jacks. Can these be used as a passthru like a regular vcr? For instance, I am on a cable modem, could I pass the cable feed thru the 350 and out to the cable modem, or will I need to run a new cable line for the card?

2. The Hardware decoder, is it only used for the 350's captures or will it work like my old Creative Labs DVD MPEG encoder/accelerator? When I had the accelerator, and watched a DVD, my CPU usage was almost zero. Now (Since the card has finally died), when I watch a DVD I see the cpu spike up a little. Not too bad, I'm on a 2.4 Pentium, but was curious if this card will free the CPU usage any on DVD playback.

3. Has anybody used the FM tuner? How's the reception? Is there a way to add an antenna?

4. Audio connections. Again, based on the pictures, it looks like this card has it's own audio terminals. Do I have to loop it to my sound card, or does it take care of the audio signal for you. I have read that it handles the signals itself, but would like somebody who has used this card to give some feedback.

As I said at the start, I would like something that will let me transfer a few older video tapes to DVD and maybe replace a VCR or two. I would appreciate any info that anybody may have regarding this card (or other alternatives).

I would like to stay with something that has a HW Encoder as opposed to a SW one. Since I'll be transferring these to DVD, I don't really care that I can't output the files to DIVX format (At least from what I've read, or am I wrong?) as my players (and the extended family who will be getting videos of the grandson) do not handle the DIVX format.

Thanks in advance.

kosekjm

BTW, under my computer specifications, I have a 30gb drive listed, that will soon be getting an additional 160GB WD so I'm not too worried about storage space

[aurgathor]

1) One of the RF jack is for the FM tuner, and this should partly answer 3)
2) The decoder doesn't work on computer playback, only if you feed the video out to TV
4) No need for soundcard for recording

HW encoding is nice on paper, but it's less than perfect.

[Jayhawk]

I agree with aurgathor on the number questions but not on the comment about hardware encoding. I have the PVR-250 which is the same except for the FM tuner and a video out. I'm using primarily for TV program capture and burn to DVD but have also transferred a bunch of VHS tapes. My results have been excellent versus an All-In-Wonder that used software encoding. As a matter of fact, I bought the 250 because it did have hardware encoding.

One other question you asked related to cable hookup. I use a simple splitter ($2 - $4) to split my cable feed into two lines, one to the PVR-250 and one to my cable modem. You do not need a completely separate line, just a splitter and a very short line.

Highly recommended.

[Beavis]

I'm with Jayhawk. I get excellent results with my 250 recording TV shows and VHS for burning to SVCD's (and now DVD's)- and I can do it on an older system too. The only issue was finding a program that could do precise edits on the mpegs to get rid of commercials without re-encoding the whole thing or causing sync issues. I would highly recommend this type of card for any application where minimal (or none at all) editing is needed to avoid having to deal with an AVI intermediate-

There's different ways to hook up the video. Rather than split my cable signal again, I just use the composite outputs from a hi-fi VCR into the card and it works fine.

[aurgathor]

I agree with aurgathor on the number questions but not on the comment about hardware encoding.

I have a few mpeg snippets to back up my opinion -- in any case, I've found 2 major (?!) problems with the 350's HW encoder:
a) sometimes a bunch of colored squares appear on the display; this usually lasts for a single frame, so it's difficult to catch, but it actually happens quite often
b) sometimes the display just "breaks up" and gets completely messed up -- this lasts for a few frames (so it's very difficut to miss) but I've seen it only a couple of times.

It's nice to have an encoder with practically 0% CPU usage, but because of the above artifacts, I've found the quality unacceptable. Specifically because of these 2, I'm now looking for a card that can do raw avi since an encoder with no realtime requirement should be able to do a lot better job of encoding. I'm likely to be more finicky on this than an average user, though , so others might dismiss this as minor or insignificant.

[lordsmurf]

The PVR 350 and an ATI All In Wonder can both give about the same results. Like another person has said "hardware" doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of quality. Just less CPU usage. If you have a good CPU, why does it matter?

[kosekjm]

Hi all,

Thanks for the answers and advice.

Lordsmurf, currently the machine that I am looking at putting this in is a P4 2.4, however, if I get this running with any semblance of wife friendliness, I am likely to swap it into an older 800 mhz box that I have lying around and replace the vcr in the living room. I figured the 800 box would need the HW encoder/decoder. How are the ATI cards on older boxes? I guess I could always put the 2.4 in the living room and order up a new 3.4 for the computer room, but I'm sure the wife would have me beaten (She's a red head)

aurgathor, I too am one of those overly finiky people(Do you count the gunshots in movies like I do?), so it is possible that I would see these artifacts as well. Of course, having Charter cable, I'm used to seeing artifacts all the time, so I may not notice anymore. You mentioned that you are searching other cards, have you found any that sound interesting?
Also, how big are the snippets? Any way to take a peek at them?

beavis, what software did you end up using to do the commercial edits?

Again, I would like to thank everybody for their answers. All comments are highly appreciated.

kosekjm

BTW, lordsmurf excellent sites that you have. Thanks for the great info (Of course DVDrhelp is also a great site, don't want to anger the forum managers )

[Jayhawk]

beavis, what software did you end up using to do the commercial edits?

Not beavis but I useWomble's Mgeg-Vcr to edit commercials I like it because it's faster than most and does require re-encoding complaint mpg files (although you can if you want).

[lordsmurf]

The 800mhz box probably could use an ATI AIW card, but the safer choice is the Hauppauge for an older machine.

I think the AIW has a slight quality edge over the 250/350, but a lot of that is because of the MMC software, which needs at least a 1.x CPU and 256-512 minimum RAM (most new machines from past 3-4 years easily have this spec).

AIW definitely has the price advantage.

Womble MPEG-VCR gets my vote too, use it for 99% of my MPEG "editing".

[Beavis]

beavis, what software did you end up using to do the commercial edits?

Not beavis but I useWomble's Mgeg-Vcr to edit commercials I like it because it's faster than most and does require re-encoding complaint mpg files (although you can if you want).

Yeah, a recent version of Womble is nice and fast and does the job. I had an older version of Ulead video studio that would work with its smart render feature but it was slow and often choked on larger files when editing them.

...and my old PVR 250 doesn't pixelate or throw artifacts beyond what would be expected at a given bitrate.

[aurgathor]

The snippets are big enough that I cannot email them. (I only use web based email) I can upload them to an ftp site, or you can get it from me using an opennap compatible p2p client such as WinMX, Xnap. etc.

As for the capture card, that's still up in the air, but I'm looking into some higher priced cards.

[tmaxwell2435]

I have a PVR-350 and want to capture some VHS tapes to the PC. I don't really want to use the software that came with the card.

What software are you guys using to capture from VHS?


Thanks!