NewsHauppauge 1212 HD-PVR: It Just Works
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
Nice write-up. I’m using the HD-PVR with SageTV and its working very well. One thing I want to point out though. You do realize that the HD-PVR does not currently support 5.1 audio right? Hauppauge has a driver update that hasn’t been released yet that will give us that 5.1 audio, but as of right now we’re stuck without DD.
Correct, sorry for not mentioning that. Hauppauge has said that the driver for 5.1 was supposed to be available at launch, but that they had to delay it due to bugs.
This, of course, was because they were busy with a Media Center driver… which Microsoft backed away from when they yanked H.264 from TV Pack 2008…
Thanks for the review, I think I am going to pick this up. I’ll be real happy if I can just run this on Sage TV out of the box.
~Bear
Looks like VirtualHub is only for the Mac. Do you know of a good PC converter program for the HD-PVR .TS files?
Might want to give Badaboom a try… you may have to run it through WinTV’s MP4 converter first.
Quick update on the 5.1: Hauppauge has just added 5.1 and AAC support for the HD-PVR in their latest beta driver.
Hi Chris,
I thought the Hauppauge used M2TS, not “standard” MPEG-2 TS files. But still, why is it “horrific”?
I might have a different view than you on this, I have an eGreat EG-M31B Networked Media Tank (think: Popcorn Hour A-110 if you’ve heard of it) and it plays back TS files just fine.
I got here looking for Mac support discussion of this Hauppauge device; my interest in this thing would be to allow me to get DVR recordings out of my DirecTV HR-21/100 into the eGreat - which would allow me to either consider the HR-21’s puny internal drive as just a cache or allow me to migrate existing recordings to the eGreat so I could slap on an external 1 TB RAID unit onto the HR-21’s eSATA port.
Right now if you replace the internal drive (or override it) on a DirecTV box you can’t access your existing recordings any longer, so to me this would be a neat thing to have to provide a way of getting them off the internal HDD before replacing/overriding it with an external. Unfortunately without Mac OS X support this isn’t so easy, I don’t like booting my MacBook Pro into Boot Camp for very long!
Lots of things can playback transcoded files… VLC being the most known and trusted app for the task. It’s when you want to edit them that it becomes a bang-head-against-wall-facepalming process. VisualHub is the only truly reliable app I’ve come across that can convert TS files properly.
You may want to try VMWare Fusion, which offers USB support… the PVR may pass through to that properly (then again, it may not). I haven’t tested the HD PVR on a Mac running Windows in any fashion… I have an Inspiron 530n plugged into my TV for that.
Christopher, good write-up. the techspansion web site has an announcement that VisualHub has been discontinued. So I’m on the hunt for an alternative to convert the .TS files
The ArcSoft package that comes with the HD PVR contains a conversion tool. It seems to produce usable output in a few different formats, but it’s really really slow.
I’ll try badaboom, but I’ll probably have to upgrade my video card…
Thanks for the heads up, I’ve disputed the charge for VisualHub… as it looks like the developer won’t make good on the promise to fix the known issues in it.
As I noted in the review, the WinTV MP4 conversion tool does work… but the header that it produces is malformed. As such, no Apple application (iTunes, all the way to Final Cut Studio), will touch the files that it makes. Hopefully Hauppauge will update it to fix the bug.
VisualHub was just a smart veneer over “ffmpeg” anyway, and in my (limited) use of it, it most always got things wrong if I didn’t use it for fairly simple stuff. You can probably coax “ffmpegX” to do what you want if you learn more about what to feed to “ffmpeg” - admittedly, it was nice that the VisualHub guy did the heavy lifting for us.
As for VLC playing back transcoded files, maybe my 2006-vintage 2.16 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro (with only 2 GB) is just too slow to handle it, but VLC 0.9.x still chokes a lot on 1080p content.
I do hear you on the editing-is-a-bitch comment, however.
I have VMware Fusion installed but I don’t think it’s got the oompha to handle the HD PVR. Probably would have to boot into Boot Camp directly (I’ve got XP SP2 installed) to do anything useful, and I don’t like to do that for any length of time longer than absolutely necessary (like ripping a copy-protected CD-ROM that requires direct raw metal hardware access).
I will note that I had a nice e-mail exchange with a techie from Hauppauge where I pleaded my case to him that even basic capture support for the Mac would make me a very happy man and a potential purchaser of the device (that otherwise I won’t buy, not having a dedicated Windows PC to use with it). I wonder whatever became of that idea …
To quote the Hauppauge tech (who shall remain nameless) directly:
“I’m wondering whether I want to create a true Mac USB driver and a small set of capture-only tools. Obviously offering support. I can’t afford to do that work for free.
In your experience, is this something you and the rest of the community would be willing to pay $30 for?”
I told him yes, and it would make the difference between me buying one and not buying one. I am hopeful that I could just capture the video and directly download it into my eGreat EG-M31B NMT and have it play as-is, with no editing/transcoding/massaging needed.
Has anyone had problems with the ArcSoft Capture module locking-up as soon as the capture button is clicked? Everything was working pretty well for me for a few days — the capture module worked most of the time, but now it freezes-up everytime I try to capture. Oddly enough when the GUI freezes, the capture continues — I just have to make sure I am at the PC to kill it with Task Manager when it is time to stop the capture. A pain — it would be nice to use the capture duraiton capability. The resulting TS file is fine.
To resolve I have re-installed the software, and even reverted back to an old HDD image and re-installed — it still locks up every time. I almost suspect the HD PVR hardware of firmware is the problem since a software re-install does not change the behavior.
I haven’t had any issues with that… I would try downloading the beta driver for the HD PVR, and make sure your graphics card drivers are up-to-date.
Also, double check the system requirements… it is a demanding setup.
Thought I’d post this just in case someone runs into the same problem that I mention above with the ArcSoft capture module freezing up.
For an unrelated reason I upgraded my graphics card, and the problem with the ArcSoft capture module was resolved. This could be for a number of reasons — maybe the graphics card install over-wrote a corrupt file that the ArcSoft re-install did not fix. It could have been the slower performance of the old graphics card as well.
Just thought I’d mention that the AC3 of the box has some sort of incompatibility with the Verizon HD STB. It seems to be a known problem. I sure hope they will fix it or I am considering returning mine.
2 channel audio works fine.