I had my concerns about the Hauppauge 1212 HD PVR. First, it lost Media Center support (thanks to Microsoft gutting H.264 from TV Pack 2008 at the last minute). Then, it got delayed… a lot.
But, when it comes to capturing HD video, there aren’t a lot of choices out there. A few FireWire boxes touted component in, but they didn’t have the processing power to handle HD video. There are a few cards out there which are cheap, but the ones below the HD PVR’s $249 price tag, suffer from the same video-audio sync issues.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the HD PVR just works. It captures video without trouble, and it puts video on the computer in a state that you can actually edit.
There are a couple of flaws. First, it puts video in the horrific .TS file. I believe that this was due to the chipset that Happuage had to go with to meet the price tag. Thankfully, they include an MP4 converter. Unfortunately though, the MP4 converter botches the header tags… preventing the files from loading in QuickTime (and yes, that includes Apple TV, iTunes, iMovie, and Final Cut). Ouch.
But, there is a quick fix, VisualHub will turn the .TS H.264 file into a H.264, or an (oversized) standard MPEG-4 file, without any trouble. VisualHub is only $24, and considering Amazon.com chops $40 off the retail price, you’re still saving money versus competing products.
Did I mention that it’s the only capture box (with a reasonable price tag) that will capture 5.1 surround sound, in addition to capturing 1080i in H.264? Yeah, that’s hot.
Bottom line: I love my HD-PVR. It lets me capture HD video up to 1080i, without costing me an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, the lack of Media Center support means that it really isn’t going to serve it’s original purpose (of being, well, an HD-PVR), but it does make the best capture device on the market for prosumers.
Room for improvement: Mac support, banish the .TS format, Media Center support (beg Microsoft for an updated TV Pack 2008).
And, to show it in action, here’s my HD PVR capturing an Xbox 360 bug. I took the H.264 TS file, and ran it through VisualHub, converting it to an MPEG-4 on maximum quality.
Xbox 360 Bug (MPEG-4, 26.5 MB)
Buy an HD-PVR from Amazon.com
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>>> is smart cutter better than arcsoft TME?
Smartcutter does frame accurate cutting and re-encodes only a couple of frames at the beginning and end in order to establish frame accuracy (unless you are cutting exactly on an I-frame). I subsequently feed the cut stream into my own app (or mencoder) which then recompresses it. The PVR does not encode very well at low bitrates and you can get the bitrate down further and better by re-encoding using a good standalone x264 encoder.
I wasn’t happy with what TME itself was offering.
But the important part is that Smartcutter does not re-encode, i.e. zero generation loss.
>>> oh yeah, and maybe one time out of 10 it will record for about an hour then it freezes up… i need a lot of help!
I hate to say it but that sounds like a lemon. I had one of those as well, would disconnect very once in a while. Eventually it died completely. Hauppage exchanged it without questions.
However, before you do this make sure the device is not overheating. They did not add a fan (or the ones they used to place in it were so positioned that they didn’t effect any airflow ;-). It *will* work fine with the chipset I eventually got (had it now for quite some time and did countless recordings). It will *very rarely* disconnect. It’s so rare that I couldn’t tell you whether it’s actually a problem of the device or my PC.
Btw, if you lose connection simply turning it off and on should cause the PC to recognize it again. If it doesn’t you *do* have an issue.
As for overheating, I’ve noticed a distinct improvement(less freezing up) after I placed the box on its side, instead of flat. It seems to stay cooler that way.
I’ve tried this with a couple of computers, one laptop and one desktop, and I’m running out of processing power on both of them, since playback is very jumpy (and when I look at processing power, at least one of the processors is maxed out). At the moment, all I’m doing is pulling in data to the PC and playing it directly using vlc (using OpenSUSE linux). The plan is to integrate it into a mythTV box, but
Can anyone give me a good recommendation for a graphics card and processor combination that will not be over-taxed by the PVR-1212.
I know that a 1.46GHz Pentium T2310 with an Intel X3100 graphics card doesn’t cut the mustard.
I also know that a 2GHz AMD Athlon X2 3800+ with NVidia GEForce 6150 and 256MB memory is equally asthmatic. The latter surprised me, as this is a reasonably high powered set of components.
What are people running to get this box to work well?
Jeff
I run an AMD4500 with an 6200 motherboard integrated using Win7. I can play back full HD 1980×1020 without dropping frames with the Core decoder although the TM decoder is also very good. VLC has a very bad (as in performance) h280 decoder. You will have a hard time playing back decent HD video under Linux. There are simply no optimized drivers for any card. For HD you will have to go Windows and it works very well. My configuration is not exactly high-powered but it requires the Core codec due to its efficiency. 10 bucks.
The TME software sucks. Crash every time I try to record video. Have gone through Hauppauge & ArcSoft support with no luck on an XP & Win7 computer. Even RMA’ed the HD PVR. SageTV does work but I’m not going to spend that much to replace software that should work originally.
My Happauge 1212 works flawlesly. Since I’m on a Mac I use Elgato EyeTv instead of the bundled software.
connecting it to my Fios DVR is a snap. when I watch a recorded show, If I want to keep it, I just hit the red EyeTv record button and I get a flawless copy on my computer. The included editing functions aren’t much to write home about, but are good enough to strip out the commercials. I can save the final result in any modern format I choose. IT JUST PLAIN WORKS.
You need to force the Drivers if you are using Win7 to record. I had problems when I updated to Win7 but now it is working fine. Make sure your video card has a least 512MB on board and you are not driving two monitors. When you do this the picture freeze a lot.
I have had this device for almost a year now. Never had any issues until the past month. All of sudden device seems to freeze up. Where when I record, and then press stop on the software. The device is still on recording. With the blue light and red light still active. The problem is even with the the machine acting like it’s on. It’s not recording anything at all. The device stopped recording some where before the stop button was pressed. THe only way to stop the device is to unplug. When you check the file only half of it recorded. I have done complete reinstalls! Right now it seems it may be the device losing connection through the usb cable or port of the Hauppauge. If I just record of 5 to 9 minutes no problems. Anything past that and this happens. Any opinions on this would be appreicated!
Here is a video showing the issue!
Hi,
thought I’d mention that I tweaked YAMF so it flawlessly reencodes Hauppauge 59.97 video at 23.976 (if it’s film). Get it at http://24hourloop.com/downloads/cat_view/18-code. There is a profile included (dvr.xml) that you should import into presets. This contains all the settings necessary to recode such a file and to reduce the size to 720×480 (you can uncheck scale and it will leave it as is). Note: The Hauppauge captures very poorly (using TME) and the .ts format (bad timestamps). Use m2ts instead. Those files look relatively proper. Let me know if there are questions (just post to the thread).