2 Hauppauge Cards On 1 Computer?

[Tom Saurus]

On my dual core computer I have a Hauppauge 150 card and it is working great. Sometimes two good shows are on at the same time. Without having to the funds right now to have a new computer built, is it possible to have another Hauppauge Card installed on my existing computer and for both them to work, software wise. I would think it would cause alot of confusion for the computer to handle. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me on this topic.

[jman98]

Well. unlike ATI and similar cards, Hauppauge makes cards that use a chip on the card for video encoding so there should be no conflict there between 2 cards. I would think that this should be possible, but having not personally ever used more than 1 Hauppauge card (the PVR-350) on my PC, I cannot guarantee this. Perhaps a well crafted search on Google, Yahoo, etc. could yield someone who has actually done this.

[lordsmurf]

The hard drive will be the bottleneck, so it likely you'll have video quality issues (dropped frames, corrupt video files, etc). Unless it's a really special setup (some sort of multi-channel RAID).

[jagabo]

There are people with three or four PVR-250's in their computers and having no problems running all of them at the same time. I see no reason the PVR-150 should be any different.

Disk I/O will not be a bottleneck with a pair of hardware MEPG2 encoders like the PVR-150.

[gastorgrab]

I don't mean to interfere here but the issue is not how much load you can take off of the CPU, it's the amount of data being thrown at the disk controller, all at once.

Writing two separate files at any given bit-rate is more difficult than writing any single file at the double that same rate. In a single file the data can be written consecutively, but two separate files require the read/write head to do much more work.

Get a faaaast hard drive!
.

[edDV]

Snapstream tested 6 PVR-250's to one 5400RPM drive with no problems.
http://www.snapstream.com/community/articles/medusa/

The issue here is the PVR-250 is doing the compression in hardware. Summing 6x 8Mb/s streams or ~6MB/s is well within even a laptop drive sustained data rate. Don't try this with uncompressed tuner cards.

[gastorgrab]

Snapstream tested 6 PVR-250's to one 5400RPM drive with no problems.
http://www.snapstream.com/community/articles/medusa/

It's a trade off.

http://www.snapstream.com/community/articles/medusa/

But what if you wanted to record each show at 12mbps or add more tuners? In that case, you could take a couple of different routes. The cheapest and easiest way would to invest in a larger 7200rpm SATA-150 drive. Barring that, you could also use a striped raid set to increase total disk throughput.

And this machine is obviously dedicated to one purpose only.

It would be best to make sure that no unexpected load be put on the machine while it's capturing (AntiVirus, Screen Saver, automatic software updates, auto defrag apps, etc.).
.

[edDV]

Best policy is to capture to a second internal drive thus avoiding OS/app disk calls. From there it comes down to additive bit rates and safety margin to the drive sustained rate spec.

This all assumes a PCI bus in bus mastering mode. Bus mastering separates the tuner to disk data flows from other OS processes. You don't get this separation with USB2 external drives since the CPU is running the disk controller as a software process.

[donschjr]

I have a PVR 150 along with an HVR 1600 in my pc and I record 3 shows at once with the 3 tuners every monday night during football season. 1 show is clear qam HD DVR-MS and the other 2 are 12 Mbit/s Mpeg in GB-PVR with no problems. I do use a second hard drive for storage but this is my only pc so I'm usually using it to surf while recording.

[Tom Saurus]

Thank you for all this information. I got alot good advice from members of the videohelp website and I followed it and the computer technician I hired built be a really nice dual core machine. I still have my Pentium 4, 3.0 ghz computer. I have a AIW 9800 Pro on it. I don't use it very much because it tends to drop frames easily. Maybe I could have a Hauppauge Card installed on it instead.

I really like the clarity and the richness of the video and audio I get with my Hauppauge Card. I find the AIW 9800 somewhat inferior to it. I use a trick I was told about on this website of pausing the playback while recording with my Hauppauge and it uses barely any system resources when I do this.

My Pentium 4 computer tends to run hotter than the dual core. Another computer tech that worked on my computer before I hired the guy that works on my current computer, put the wrong motherboard in my Pentium 4 computer and instead of running at 3.0ghz it now runs as 2.0ghz because of the FSB speed. Since this happened my AIW is more susseptable to dropping frames. I tend not to use my P4 much any more because of heat issues and such.

I am thinking my best bet might be to get some hard drive space freed up on the old computer and have a Hauppauge 150 put it and just use the AIW as a backup incase the Hauppauge stops working. Unless one is doing some kind of heavy duty task the Hauppauge seems to do a good job of capturing. One wouldn't want to be encoding or using DVD Shrink while capturing video.

Thank you for all the information. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

[CubDukat]

If you have two cards,, do you have to install drivers for the second card?

Right now I have an HVR-1600 in my system, and I'm looking to add the PCI-e version (HVR-1800?) to my system and kick out the VBox USB unit I have, and I like this to go off without any hitch.

[edDV]

If you have two cards,, do you have to install drivers for the second card?

Right now I have an HVR-1600 in my system, and I'm looking to add the PCI-e version (HVR-1800?) to my system and kick out the VBox USB unit I have, and I like this to go off without any hitch.

Depends on your software. Are you using BeyondTV 4?

[lordsmurf]

I don't know why you're getting a dropped frames issue on your ATI AIW card. I'd bet it was more OS/software related (not ATI software, but other stuff on the computer). I was using ATI AIW cards back when P4 1.8Ghz was the fastest PC spec available (and even then, most folks were still using 1.5Ghz at best). I managed to get an ATI working quite nicely on a 1.5 Celeron, and it only dropped frames with the "heavy" VideoSoap filter.

Hauppauge PVR cards are great cards, but they're actually softer on the video (ATI picks up more detail -- not noise, but detail), and there is a tendency to go "hot" on image exposure (not an IRE issue -- just a bit off).

[donschjr]

If you have two cards,, do you have to install drivers for the second card?

Right now I have an HVR-1600 in my system, and I'm looking to add the PCI-e version (HVR-1800?) to my system and kick out the VBox USB unit I have, and I like this to go off without any hitch.

I have drivers installed for both my pvr 150 and my hvr 1600. I have no problem running both in GB-PVR and am getting ready to add another hvr 1600. I can't say how other software would handle my setup as I absolutely love the ease if use of GB-PVR and it's hard to beat the price (free).

[SHS]

I have perason tested up 12 tuner setup with 6 PVR-500's all run at the same time at 8mbps setting.
I know a few people that done more then that.

SnapStream Enterprise system has up to 10 tuner setup with 5 PVR-500's
As of today it no longer possable to get 6 PCI slots and it very hard to get more then 2 PCIe slots at a low cost.
Maybe next year we see some board going all PCIe whicih don't arm and leg like do now.

lordsmurf read he post
Any time you used new Fast CPU with older spec motherboard like in his case that cuases the CPU buffer data to reduce loading speed which is not running rigth for his 3GHz CPU it kind like the old DRDRAM Modules or win using SDRAM PC133 Modules on P4.

[edDV]

The HVR-1600 and 1800 can each operate as a dual tuner, one analog the other ATSC or QAM.

[CubDukat]

If you have two cards,, do you have to install drivers for the second card?

Right now I have an HVR-1600 in my system, and I'm looking to add the PCI-e version (HVR-1800?) to my system and kick out the VBox USB unit I have, and I like this to go off without any hitch.

Depends on your software. Are you using BeyondTV 4?

Yep, and I'm also using Vista Media Center, though not as much because I don't really like it for PVR duties.

What I'd really like is for Hauppauge to hurry up and give us Linux drivers that enable the ATSC part of the tuner. As soon as that happens, Vista is out the door.