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.
It’s sad to say that after sending the box back twice and having Hauppage diddling with it, the AC3 finally works but has a serious A/V drift. Support was a disaster but I managed to work through it with many phone calls, emails and eventually having the box overnighted the last time on the RMA. I would have liked to say otherwise but recording that nice HBO HD with full DD off my Verizon STB just *does not work*. Scour the net and you will find many references to oodles of problems with the box.
A first quick look blew me away with the quality, a second look told me that I would recommend staying away from it and wait until a device is out there that really will give you HD (HD without 5.1 – do you really call that High Definition?).
Ok. Let me straighten out a few things here. first .TS format is not horrific at all. It produces the smoothest video of all other formats especially at very fast moving scenes. Second, there are mpeg editors such as VideRedo that can edit the .TS format and give you professional quality results at a fraction of the cost of a commercial solution. Third, any sub $100 converter I used such as Xilisoft, and AVS4You fully support this format and produce excellent results when you convert .TS to any other format such as DiVX at very high conversion rates. On my old Athlon machine, I’m able to get as high as 27 frames per second on 1080i.
Unbeknownst to me, Steven Toth of Hauppauge (the aforementioned “tech who shall remain nameless) started an HD-PVR 1212 Mac support thread on AVS Forum:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15002333
Up to 20 pages now (as of Feb 16 2009)!
VideoRedo does *not* support editing of the h.264 .TS files that the box produces. There are some nebulous claims that it might at some point. The only true cut editor is either h.264ts_cut (freeware) or Elecard’s HD studio. Elecard kept blowing up for me with larger files. Yes, there are many others that will ‘convert’ this stuff for you but you really don’t want to recompress this (unless you want to recompress to SD as shown here: http://htpcmedia.net/faq/43-hauppage-hd-pvr.html)
I have RMA’d the box now 3 times (they wouldn’t let me RMA it if there really weren’t problems, now would they)? It has really worked for a week out of the two months that I had it. There are too many problems to mention to go through. The support is horrible.
I eventually found out it does not support the QIP-6xxx Verizon STB series (about 95% of all Verizon FiOS boxes). Only the very latest 7xxx version will work.
This box is not ready for prime time.
Wow, I’m slow on the uptake. Turns out Steven Toth already has a capture app made and it’s already up to version 2.0.9:
http://steventoth.net/hdpvrcapture/HDPVRCapture_v2.0.9.zip
Now if only I’d gotten in on the one-day Dell coupon deal last week to buy a 1212 for only $173. Oh well.
Oops, excuse me, I meant version 2.0.11:
http://steventoth.net/hdpvrcapture/HDPVRCapture_v2.0.11.zip
Sorry folks …
Ok — I’m a science teacher trying to record science channel shows for the classroom. I’m recording for educational purposes…which last I knew was still protected under U.S. Title Code although probably not under U.S. Hollywood Code. I’ve purchased almost all the published videos but many are NOT available for purpose ….silly paranoid Hollywood.
The current Comcast-DVD recorder only records in some low quality. Does this device allow me to record to a DVD, or, I guess I have to record to my computer and then rewrite to a DVD? Thank you, -Lewis
It won’t let you recod in higher quality than what you plug in there. After months of diddling with support I finally made the thing work with my Verizon STB. That is HD. I use that and compress it down to SD (DVD quality). The box itself only comes with software to record to HD and in some odd format (It records in 50 fps for technical reasons but that can easily be corrected, I put a tutorial together on how to do this here: http://htpcmedia.net/faq/43-hauppage-hd-pvr.html). However, using a few steps you can build a DVD from it using free tools (maybe I should write a tutorial on that, too and move the whole thing of the Htpcmedia site).
If your Comcast box has poor output, the Hauppage cannot improve upon it. If you have some better feed than what comes from the box, you get that quality. The degradation in quality, even after recompression, is very good.
Rolf – thanks.
The Comcast box I have — Scientific Atlanta – 8300HDC — I get great quality HD on the screen. I can record to the DVR in great quality HD, and replay onto tv screen. In Florida I was able to then rerecord to the DVD player and the recording was excellent. However, up here in New Hampshire, the signal is specifiaclly changed through the HDMI cable so that the resulting recording is just terrible — it has nothing to do with HD, or DVD, or my DVD recorder, or the cables — it is that built into the signal going through the HDMI cable is a check that prevents recording. Not sure how it is done.
So — this Hauppage box allows me to record. That’s great. I’ll look at your tutorial. thank you,
Again — all I’m trying to do is record the occasional show on the science channel that IS NOT available for sale, so I can show some small clip in class on solar wind or global-warming — the new standards prevent me from doing this. …….all those actors, movie executives — they managed to get Congress to care about this, to act like it was an international crisis, passed legislation establishing new industry-wide standards that are now built into the signal ….that’s the only thing I can think of.
-Lew
Lewis,
to be clear: The box does *not* allow you to record off HDMI directly, you have to go through component (you know, the three cables). I have a pretty good eye and two 50″ Plasmas and I cannot see any difference between the two. You cannot record off HDMI because it is part of a ‘trusted path’, the signal is encrypted. So far I know of nobody that has found a solution for that. But the component video will work for you, guaranteed. Make sure you have component output on the STB, though.
As for what you are trying to do: Since you are not breaking any method from duplicating the signal (such as decrypting DVDs, for example, and you are only using portions of it for academic purposes, I am fairly certain that this falls under fair use and you have nothing to worry about (I am no lawyer but have looked into this in more or less detail).
component — yes — I have my tv currently wired that way; I’ve disconnected the HDMI cable — don’t need it — thanks for your comments,
-Lew
Is anybody succesfull capture 1080i from DishNetwork using ViP(R) 622 reciever. My the sound is out of sync. But when I change the R622 to give me output to 480p the sound is fine using the same software the come with the device. Also used the try out version of segaTV same thing. Any help will appreciate. Thanks
Sorry, I forgot to mention that my PC is Windows XP profesional.
Are you capturing AC3?
If this is default the answer is yes using the software that came with HD PVR 1212. I haven’t play to much with the settings.
Just a quick update: after installing a USB2.0 CardBus card in an old 1 GHz PowerBook G4, I am successfully using the 1212 on a Mac with version 2.4.1 of Steven Toth’s HDPVRCapture software. I am therefore happy to say that even on a Mac, as Christopher Price says, the 1212 “Just Works”.
My box finally work using a PC machine. I went to the Hauppage site and find the Beta drivers that fix the out of sync that I have with my equipment. Thanks for your help.
Hi, does anyone know any good TS to MP4 converters? Or in Arcsoft how to I make the format MP4, and not TS?
See my site. It took me a *long* time to figure out. Note that the latest version of Totalmedia also has the ability to capute to MP4 but I presume very much this is still at the 59.97 rate.
Here is the direct link: http://24hourloop.com/component/content/article/38-hauppage-2
It’s very terse because I really wanted to get the info out but didn’t really have the time to spend on writing the article. If you have questions just shoot me an email.
I have converted dozens of movies this way and it is the *only* way to reliably do so (for reasons I cannot delve into here).
10-04-09
What’s the current state of this product? I have a bunch of shows on my Comcast/Motorola DVR that I would like to preserve and the 1212 seems like a solution. But I’ve read a lot of negative feedback – most of it over a year old. Has Hauppauge fixed the bugs in this unit? I really don’t want to invest a week’s worth of time getting this to work. So what’s the deal on this? Is it worth it or are there better solutions?
~Dave
The problems regarding A/V syn were related to the QIP-6x series of the Motorola noxes (those still often installed by Verizon). I jumped through hoops to have them install me the QIP-7x (which they will gladly do but their administrative system is just not set up to handle such a request). Having done so I have absolutely not problems.
Hauppage also released a new driver which is supposed to have solved the problem but having a box which hasn;t had a problem sinch its install I have been unable to verify it.
Bottom line: Have your provider get you the current version of the Motorola chipset and you are ok.
The Arcsoft software included in this package SUCKS. The “Capture Module” continually freezes up, crashes my comp, and is a general pain in the neck. Also, the PVR box needs to be turned on for me to watch tv through the cable box without recording anything–the pass thru feature only passes the component video signal while the box is powered up. My comp is continually giving me “USB device not recognized” messages, forcing me to turn PVR off/on to get my comp to see it. I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled 4 times now, and the problems persist. Maybe Hauppauge.Arcsoft should’ve worked the bugs out before releasing it to the public.
Hey guys, just wanted some advise.
I am about to purchase this because I want to record my PS3 GAME PLAY. That is all I really want to do. I also want to be able to edit the videos. Some quick questions..
1.) Hook up to my Tv, PS3 and than my computer correct?
2.) How good is the editor?
3.) I have a PC which is best method to convert from .TS format (I don’t even know what .TS format is)
I am a huge noob at this capture card and I would really like some help to get started or to get some general idea of how to proceed and accomplish this before I purchase it.
Any suggestions?
1.) You stick it between your computer and your DVR (or other device which renders a three-cable composite analog video signal). The out of the DVR is a set of audio and video jacks carrying the same signal that was fed into it. The box must be turned on for this to happen.
2.) The editor sucks. If you are interested in cut-editing I have only found one truly frame accurate solution without picture distortion (no free solution offer true frame cutting) which is Smart Cutter. I think it’s pretty cheap and has worked great for me. It will cut any number of slices by re-encoding the small part of GOPs that you might be cutting into (normally you can only cut at an i-Frame boundary). There is no picture degradation and processing is pretty quick. I am no way affiliated with the guys that make this software.
3.) The best way I found is mplayer/mencoder. There are other transcoders but I generally found them to not work particularly well and/or crash. The software that comes with it works great for recording but that is about it. To plug my stuff: I wrote YAMF, a cross platform frontend for mecoder which I personally sue (of course it’s free). (Note that solutions like MeGUI do *not* work). You can find a lot of explanation of that on my site at 24hourloop.com but the bottom line is that they are based on AviSynth. AviSynth cannot interpret PTS, time stamps in the A/V stream that keep audio and video in sync. The problem with Hauppauge streams is that inevitably a few bad frames (very few) creep into the stream and thus the result is no longer pure 59.94 frames a second. Anything pumped through AviSynth simply must be out of sync. Mencoder is smart enough to interpret these time stamps. There is also an x264 build that does although I haven’t tried it because mencoder does both audio and video encoding and thus represents the easiest way of doing things. You can get mencoder/mplayer builds at Sourceforge but I also have a couple of builds as downloads.
There is a lot more to be said about conversion of these streams and I encourage you to google and look at my site for details.
So Rolf, I need to have a circle of connections from the PC to the DVR to the hauppage correct? I don’t even need to plug anything into my PS3 RIGHT?
Second you recommend Smart Cutter right? I am not concerned with the cost of it, just something reasonable so if it is recommedned I am game. How user friendly is this? Do I need to take like a course to run this lol.
Now you recommended mencoder… sounds good to me. So, do I record, capture then convert and then edit?
I am trying to figure out the step by step from begining to end.
If you can give me more tips I would appreciate it. Thanks for the info thus far, I will check out some mencoder downloads you mentioned.
Yes, you pretty much got it. Smart Cutter is very simply, just cut-edit, meaning there is an easy and super-fiendly way to select which portions of the video you want to keep (you probably want to get rid of the commercials, I presume, or the beginning and end of a broadcast).
The way you connect (if you have a cable box) would be
Cable box->Hauppage->TV. The Hauppage then has a USB out which plugs into your computer. It has the already compressed video signal. There are a number of other ways you can hook things together which I am leaving out not to confuse you. The PS3 doesn’t come into play. I presume you might want to plug this into an alternate input on your TV.
Yes, you capture. You have multiple options in which format you want to capture but I strongly urged 1280x720p (it also does interlaced but that does not bode well with subsequent compression). You capture and out comes a ts file (TS stands for transport stream and it is simply a method on how different signal stream (audio, video, subtitles, chapters etc.) are combined into one file. Of course, your file will only have audio and video.
You then open the thing up in Smart Cutter. You can scrub along or jump or go frame by frame, it is really idiot proof. Essentially put select every clip that you want to keep and add to a list (you click on ‘Add to list’). Then you click ‘record’ and out comes a glitch-free new .ts file.
That one you open in mencoder (I strongly suggest using a frontend, doesn’t have to be mine, any good one will do but otherwise you will be diddling with command line options which if you feel like a noob you might not want to do).
What I like to do is to compress the thing down to 720×480 which really comes out at perfect DVD quality.
If you want to keep the high quality format you may also decide to simply keep what comes out of Smart Cutter. Bear in mind that those files are pretty big (8Mbits). Compare that to a nicely squeeze high-quality encode of 1.5Mbits. Play with it and you will see what you prefer.
Anyhow, if you use mencoder for encoding out comes an avi file. For h.264 this is really not an ‘officially’ supported format but it will generally be playable. What you best do is re-multiplex this into Matroska (.mkv). For reasons beyond short explanation you cannot put this into mp4 (AC-3 cannot go into MP4). For the multiplexing you can use mkvmerge (or the Gui). Look for a Matroska download.
I personally like some sort of chapter points in the movie to be able to navigate quickly. All that takes is to put a chapter file into the Matroska file.
Anyhow – if the whole process sounds too complicated: My little proggie will re-encode (single, multiple files in parallel or you can queue up a bunch, multiplex into Matroska and automatically insert chapter points. Nothing you cannot do with all these utilities yourself but I got tired of command files and strings of options and trying to figure out how to crop a movie and this sort of thing.
ok im pissed i just droped 2 bills on this thing and cant get a picture on my tv or the softwear i installed the updated drivers so i think and nothing HELP what am i doing wrong???????????????????
cREDRUM187: Re: “can’t get a picture on my tv” – you aren’t supposed to. It’s a Personal Video RECORDER, not a playback device. You feed it Component Out from your satellite or cable box as input, and it outputs digital video to your computer over the USB port.
[quote]cant get a picture on my tv or the softwear i installed the updated drivers so i think and nothing HELP what am i doing wrong???????????????????[/quote]
You’ll have to be more specific. Did you connect everything exactly as the instructions say? Is the PVR box turned on when you try to watch tv? You won’t get a picture on the tv unless the box is turned on. Also, if the capture module input is not set to the right input source, you get no picture on the tv. For example- if the CM input is set to the front jacks on the PVR, and your cable box is plugged into the BACK input jacks – NO TV PICTURE. I had to reinstall the software several times to get a picture through the USB and onto my comp. Also, once while turning the HD-PVR off, it crashed my comp and destroyed my secondary hard drive — I and Hauppauge have no idea why. Be careful.
Oh, and Hauppauge tech support ALSO SUCKS!
Same comment here. Must be turned on. Make sure you actually plugged IN into IN and OUT into OUT (it is not simply a hardwired connection), make sure you selected the correct inputs, make sure you got the cables correctly.
First thin you want to check is – does your computer even recognize the device. Plug it in, turn it on – after a second on the front a YELLOW light should come on. That’s when the driver touched base with the hardware. You should hear the familiar ‘ping’.
As the other poster said – I had it wrong a number of times myself. Just read the manual and don’t assume you already know where everything is being plugged in. One step at a time.
I also have intermittent trouble with the comp recognizing the box through the USB. Sometimes I even get the “USB DEVICE NOT RECOGNIZED” when I’m not doing anything! I tend to agree with a previous poster who thinks the box is the source of the problems, not the software. What REALLY drives me nuts is the almost constant freezing up when the “CAPTURE” button in the capture module is pressed — the capture window and frame counter are frozen, but it’s actually recording into a file. Then you have to kill it through Task Manager, open the capture module AGAIN, and try it AGAIN. Very very buggy device, but I’m so dependant on it now, if I sent it in to the geniuses at Haupaugge for a replacement (judging by the posts here, that is a hit-and-miss proposition) I’d have to get a second unit so I don’t miss anything!
Why doesn’t anything work right anymore?
okay, i started recording last saturday, only 5 days ago…
for the first 2 or 3 days it was flawless
now i keep getting this error msg “device is not applicable, or is being used by another program”, i reconnect, then it works for about another 5 mintues, then the same problem…
i have no idea what the problem is… is it arcsoft totalmediaextreme? or is it the pvr itself?
i need help…
plz reply…
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!
reply as soon as possible…
@rofl erntst:
is smart cutter better than arcsoft TME? im recording my xbox (thousands do), and i rly just want to record and edit out bad parts of my gameplay, and then send to an editor, so he can edit it, and then it gets put on youtube, then i get paid by my sponsor…
i used pinnacle, but that ran out of room lol…
>>> 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).