Hauppauge HD-PVR

Finally received mine yesterday, and the DirecTV guy came this morning to do the HD upgrade for me (new dish and 2 new HD STB).

I played with it all afternoon!! here's a few of my initial thought......

1) it works! it did able to record ANY HD channels from my DirecTV HD box!! I've recorded two sample clips that I'm gonna upload it for you guys to see!! one is from StarHD(?) movie channels showing Perfect Stranger, the other one is the French Open from ESPN2HD. both is about 1 mins long and weight 60-80MB when recording at 9M bitrate.

2) too bad none of the current public version of BeyondTV nor SageTV support the HD-PVR yet!! the latest street rumor is the new version that support the HD-PVR will be out in days!! however, I've tried to setup BTV to see if I can make it work..... simple answer is NO. it couldn't capture the video nor audio since it doesn't support this device yet. but by running the setup wizard, it does allow me to choose the HD-PVR as a capture device tho. just no picture nor sound.

3) at least at the moment, I can use the HD-PVR as a tuning device to tune the channel of the DirecTV HD box instead of using my old IR blaster!! it means the HD-PVR could tune the DirecTV HD box right out of the box w/out any problem.

4) the current driver does not support DD5.1 sound! when I set the DirecTV box to output DD instead of 2 channels, it just make a loud beep noise. Hauppauge said new driver will be out w/in a couple weeks to fix this problem.... I'll see....

5a) either the driver and/or the Arcsoft software that come with the HD-PVR needs to be improved!! when just watching live HD using the Arcsoft's software, it crashed my HTPC a couple times!!!

5b) and when after a recording (stopped record/capture), the pic quality will degrade A LOT!! it's like having a low signal when using a OTA HD antenna if you know what I mean!! the pic is just.... breaking up.... lots of blocks.... and shuttering.... and it ONLY happen after finished a recording!!

5c) have to restart the HD-PVR too (turn off and on) IF the HTPC was crashed while watching TV.

imho, it sure needs some improvement or stability upgrade. and it might be the main reason why SageTV and BeyondTV don't have an offical release to support it yet. may be they too are waiting for a more muture driver....

however, it does do what I or most people that looking for this to do, enable one to record any HD channels from the cable/sat box!!

when the BeyondTV release the offical support and/or when the driver/software is more muture/stable, I think I'll be getting one more for the other HD box so I could watch & record different channel at once.

here's the video clips:

French Open on ESPN2HD 86MB

Movie: Prefect Stranger on StarzHD(?) movie channel 65MB

p.s. it might take a little while..... (10mins+/-)

they are .TS file. many video player should have no problem to watch it. the length is about 1-1:30mins. recorded at 1920x1080 resolution, 9mb bitrate, 2 channel sound.

oops.... the above two video are both French Open!

here's the HD movie one. <40mb, 30-40sec long.

Good quality with the vids. I'm curious if you'd be willing to throw up some clips of some high action scenes, as well as some cartoon/anime, using the highest bitrate possible. I always end up recording at the highest bitrate to retain the quality of the original showing, and to have something that can easily be edited and re-encoded to another format if its something I wish to keep.

the only problem is BTV still hasn't support it....

and I haven't have much time to play around it lately....

Wow I can't believe there is so little talk on here about this product! Landshark, just curious what your impression is now that you have had a while to play with it? I am moving into my new home at the end of the month and plan on picking one of these up.

hey Brad, there's a loooooooong thread over @ avsforum 'bout this product. I haven't really play with it much lately as 1, BTV still isn't offically support it, and 2, I'm thinking to migrate to SageTV, and lastly, been busy with other stuffs...

As I said in the other thread about this... I ordered mine yesterday. SageTV now has support for it in their v6.4 release... and OMG I can't believe LS might make the move to Sage. LOL

Hey LS- got a link to that thread over at AVS? I think some reading is definitely in order before mine comes in.

harlam357 said:

As I said in the other thread about this... I ordered mine yesterday. SageTV now has support for it in their v6.4 release... and OMG I can't believe LS might make the move to Sage. LOL

Hey LS- got a link to that thread over at AVS? I think some reading is definitely in order before mine comes in.

Click to expand...

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1015617

yeah, one of the reason I wanna switch to SageTV is their official support of the HD PVR, AND integration of both PVR & MediaCenter function. after 4 yrs, I'm a bit tired of Meedio+BTV combo.....

...don't forget to load the SageMC STV... lots of extra goodness there.

Man... is it true!? You mean, I might have something HTPC-like actually up and fully working before Sharky? I feel so 'cutting-edge' now!

Any idea how well this works from a Comcast Digital Cable Box? Also I've read that it seems to have (or had with previous firmware) quite a problem overheating. Have you had any issues with that?

jabaro said:

Any idea how well this works from a Comcast Digital Cable Box? Also I've read that it seems to have (or had with previous firmware) quite a problem overheating. Have you had any issues with that?

Click to expand...

I haven't have much time to really play with it yet. but is going to soon.

jabaro said:

Any idea how well this works from a Comcast Digital Cable Box? Also I've read that it seems to have (or had with previous firmware) quite a problem overheating. Have you had any issues with that?

Click to expand...

Should work from any cable box... couple things you're going to have to work out though.

- output from the STB: there seems to be an issue with 720p capture right now, so you may need to setup the STB to output only 1080i for HD channels and 480i for any standard-def stuff you may want to record through the STB. How to do that is probably different for each STB manufacturer. I luckily didn't need to fool with mine, but I've read that others have.

- how to control channel changing: I was previously using a PVR-150 to capture the s-video output of my STB, and using firewire to control channel changing through EXETuner and Tim Moore's STB package. So when moving to the HD-PVR- I plugged it in, setup in Sage to use the EXETuner (already configued), and once again I had tuning. I totally recommend this over IR Blaster route, much more reliable.

So far mine looks pretty good... had to fool around with the ArcSoft decoders a bit, but besides their Audio HD decoder I'm using Cyberlink v7.x H.264 decoder for video. It looks better than the ArcSoft Video decoder IMO. To get full hardware accelleration to work with no macro-blocking I had to upgrade to Cats v8.8 (I read 8.7 worked as well). I'm using a lowly HD2400XT to drive this setup.

To answer your question... I checked the heat output of mine while watching football this weekend and I thought it was pretty cool, warm to the touch, but not hot by any means. Maybe this changes after extended periods of use... I've only put it through its paces for a couple hours at a time so far.

hello landshark

i hav visited the link u hav shown... that was really a useful one.. thanks for it man...

do you have more links... if so, jus give me

abiallan said:

hello landshark

i hav visited the link u hav shown... that was really a useful one.. thanks for it man...

do you have more links... if so, jus give me

Click to expand...

SageTV's forum also has quite a bit info 'bout the HD PVR too.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9

as for myself, I finally sit down and play with it a bit these past couple of weeks. (and trying out SageTV) on my living room HTPC, I'm having quite a bit of problems.... in the earlier day, I'm having lock up issue when watching LiveTV (recording is fine), but if I use TMT, I could watch recorded shows no problem (not in sage, nor MPC HC, nor even PowerDVD!). also no problem to watch the recorded shows at my daily use machine too ([email protected], 9800GT, using Nero Showtime. MPC HC won't play tho.) however, this couple of days, it changed to the other way around!! I've been having no problem watching LiveTV (even 3-4hrs straight), but I couldn't watch any recorded shows (w/out hard locked!) regardless what kinda player to use!! I'm really scratching my head since being able to watch LiveTV should means sageTV and the HTPC itself has no problem to play HD PVR's h.264 files. and if so, then why can't recorded shows??

I'm starting to get tired of all these htpc/software issue really!! as soon as SageTV's HD extender is back in stock, I'll just grab a couple to replace my htpc so I can pretty much set and forget it!! (I've heard pretty much most HD extender users have no problem for HD PVR)

LandShark said:

I'm starting to get tired of all these htpc/software issue really!! as soon as SageTV's HD extender is back in stock, I'll just grab a couple to replace my htpc so I can pretty much set and forget it!! (I've heard pretty much most HD extender users have no problem for HD PVR)

Click to expand...

Yep, I got tired of all the issues too and finally just built a Q6700 based HTPC server for Sage and got two of their HD extenders. But there are still some issues using the HD PVR with extenders.

1. I had to force the output of my sat tuner to a fixed resolution (720p) to get it to change channels smoothly. If I had it set for native resolution, it could take 10 seconds or so for video and audio to play smoothly.

2. I still cannot capture 5.1 audio reliably and have to use PCM. This is with the latest drivers on the Hauppauge web site. If my sat box and HD PVR are set to 5.1, some channels have no sound, some squeal, and some work OK.