capturing video with Hauppauge wintv-hvr-950q

[lmemsm]

Does anyone have any experience/tips to share on recording with the 950q?

I was wondering if it would do a better recording job than a standalone recorder if an ATSC signal is recorded using the Hauppauge USB stick. However, one of the notes at the Hauppauge site says the ATSC recordings are not DVD compliant. Can the recordings be converted to a DVD compliant format and if so how? Is the picture quality any better or worse than a standalone DVD recorder?

By the way, I'd read that the Hauppauge 950q USB tuners run cooler than some of the other USB tuners out there, but from what I've tried out so far, they appear to run pretty hot to me. Anyone else notice this?

Thanks.

[jman98]

Sorry, I don't have this card. I have an older analog capture card from Hauppauge. However the freeware program HDTV2MPEG2 can probably convert your captures to DVD compliant video. It's free, so it costs nothing to try. There are other ways to do this, but this is probably the easiest.

[lordsmurf]

Old post, I know, but I recently took a look at this card, and it's just awful. Jerky video, pops in the audio, and the stick is overheated quite a bit, hot to the touch.

Not a good buy, back to the store it goes!

Full review forthcoming at www.digitalFAQ.com next month.

[jagabo]

Any card that includes an ATSC or QAM tuner simply saves the MPEG 2 stream that is being broadcast. If the broadcaster is sending a 1920x1080 MPEG 2 stream, that's what's saved by the device. If they are broadcasting 1280x720, that's what you get. These are obviously not DVD compliant but they can be converted to DVD compliant MPEG 2 via software. And generally will look better than capturing standard definition analog broadcasts.

When they capture standard definition analog signals they may or may not be DVD compliant depending on how the MPEG encoder works.

[bandcamp]

i tried this card out and i returned it the next day.the card seemed picky and the wintv suite it came with sucked donkey balls.i will stay away from the new hauppauge cap cards.i will keep my old wintvgo as it caps fine for analog.put the box down and back away.

[edDV]

As Jagabo said, the incoming signal is saved to disk as broadcast. The ATSC tuner first tunes the channel then the subchannel (e.g. KABC-DT 7-1, 7-2, 7-3). Assuming you selected 7-1 (720p) the tuner card demultiplexes (i.e. separates) the MPeg2 video and AC-3 audio streams for that "PID" and saves it to disk as a file.

If you don't monitor the broadcast, all of the above is done with a very low load on the computer. If you attempt to monitor the broadcast while recording, the computer must decode the 1280x720p MPeg2/AC3 stream on the fly and convert to screen resolution. The Hauppauge ATSC tuner has no hardware support for playback. Some display cards take the full load (e.g. NVIDIA PureVideo-HD or ATI AVIVO-HD). Those that don't force the decode load to the CPU. If you are getting skipping or dropped frame audio it is most likely the computer CPU/GPU is not handling the decode.

The best test of tuner reception vs. computer playback issues is to attempt playback of the captured file. If the frames drop in the same place each attempt, then the tuner reception is probably at fault. If the computer struggles playing the file, try it on a more powerful computer with a better display card.

The above discussion applies to most computer ATSC tuners. They only capture the stream. They don't support playback of the file except with a software application that accesses DirectShow and/or the the display card.