Hauppauge Capture Devices

[dkelly701]

I am going to purchase a USB capture device from Hauppauge. I ordered the WinTV USB2 model 1020. It is listed as a Analog TV receiver. After it was ordered I found another device a little more expensive. It is listed as a Personal Video Recorder and is a Win-TV-PVR-USB2 model 941.

I want to be able to do three things. Received a signal from a cable TV box and record that signal with worrying about copy protection. Capture from an analog Hi 8 video camera, and capture my vinal albums to my computer to transfer them to CD.

I ordered this unit through Buy.com. I contacted them and they told me I could refuse the package and then reorder the model 941. My question is, would I be better off with the 941 or will the model 1020 do everything I need it to do?

[yoda313]

Hi,

Live TV from 125-channel cable ready TV tuner or from external audio/video source, on your PC or laptop screen.


High quality TV-in-a-window (any size) up to full screen. Channel surf 16 channels at a time.


With high quality TV stereo audio using dbx-TV (Nicam stereo in Europe).


Includes SoftPVR™ for making MPEG movies. Also supports video movie capture in Microsoft AVI file format, from TV or any video source.


Easy installation. Plugs directly into the USB 2.0 port on your PC or Laptop. No additional power supply required.
Note: WinTV-USB2 will not work with USB 1 ports.


Capture still video images in BMP, TIFF, TGA and JPEG formats, from live TV or any external video source.
Includes remote control

Looks fine to me. The 1020 model looks quite adequate.

But did you see that notice there?? You do have USB 2 ports right?

Kevin

[dkelly701]

Yes, USB2 on all my computers. Two things that I am not sure of with the 1020 are the SoftPVR for capture and I can't tell exactly how the audio input will work with the RCA jacks from my stereo receiver when I capture my albums.

Is SoftPVR software based MPEG compression. Isn't this bad? It says that you can do full uncompressed captures using Microsoft's AVI format. I assume that means that the box uses AVI and to watch it live, you have to use the SoftPVR software to compress on the fly to watch it live.

[yoda313]

Hi,

As for the rca inputs you'd use a y splitter to convert the left right audio plugs to the headphone size jack.

I use the wintv pci card which does direct mpeg captures. I don't have experience with avi. But I don't believe the differences would be too great.

Kevin

[junkmalle]

Is SoftPVR software based MPEG compression. Isn't this bad? It says that you can do full uncompressed captures using Microsoft's AVI format. I assume that means that the box uses AVI and to watch it live, you have to use the SoftPVR software to compress on the fly to watch it live.

Yes, the SoftPVR appears to be a software MPEG encoder. I know the Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB 2.0 has a hardware MPEG encoder.

In general realtime software MPEG encoding will be inferior to hardware based encoding because the CPU isn't specifically designed for MPEG encoding and has a limited amount of time to accomplish it. So the WinTV PVR USB2 should give you a better image. (I don't have either so I can't tell you for sure -- I have the PVR-250 PCI card). On the other hand, when you need the highest quality you can capture as AVI and convert to MPEG later, when the computer can take longer and do a better job.

The big difference: with the PVR USB2 you won't have to worry about dropped frames. You won't have to shut down all the little applets in the Sytem Tray, your antivirus software, etc. And you will be able to use your computer for other things while capturing.

[reboot]

Refuse it and get the "PVR" one.

[dkelly701]

That's what I did. Bought the WinTV PVR USB2 from CompUSA. It was $99 after rebates.

Thanks for all of the advice.