2007-03-21, 03:08 PM
I have been a gbpvr user almost 2 years now, so I have a little experience working with Plextor's video converter. For those who have a Plextor unit (I have a PX-TV402U) packed away in the closet, It will still work on the latest release...1.1.5 . I actually think the quality is better than my WinTV PVR2 USB2 unit.
Although I have had issues, I have none that currently have not been resolved. With my current setup specifically, The MCE 2005 remote plugin gave me problems.
After setting everything up on my new system (old was a amd xp 1700 512g ram) after a recording, I could not change channels, I would have to restart the recording service. Then when the next recording was scheduled, it would not change channels until a system restart, and this cycled over and over. This is almost reminiscent of the issue with the hauppage remote and blaster issues I have read about. Not looking for a solution, I have since started using HIP, and that solved the issue. (Have since moved to the Time Warner DVR box, and now change channels using the firewire connection)
Other things that gave me a fit with this card to watch for, is that depending on how you load your software, if you use system default for a decoder in playback setup it may use divx, Netradio does not like this, and you have to toggle netradio to use windows media in the config.xml file, in order to get it to work. I also use the 2.3.0.5 driver downloaded from the Europe site instead of US, and did away with WinDVR software and instead left WinDVD Creator (as mentioned in the wiki), and loaded Plextools LE version 3.12 along with the lame_dshow encoder for MP3 audio instead of mpeg2 audio.
Removing WinDVR seems to have done away with the issue I was having where if I restarted the system, or came out of hibernation mode, gbpvr could not find channel 3, and just showed static until I went into WinDVR started it, shut it down, then restarted gbpvr.
Also in the capture card quality setting, medium seems to be the only setting to be able to choose, so I change the bitrate to deal with that instead of trying to get Low, High, to work.
To deal with timeshifting not working while capturing divx, I change it to mpeg2 and trancode to divx later, this method also allows me to use comskip, and comclean, or make a dvd for a friend. (I burn divx dvd's to play in my standalone divx player/dvd recorder as a standard).
These are just a few of the things that I have done to get my plextor unit running smoothly, which I used because I wanted to be able to fit a 4 hour race on dvd, sacrificing as little quality as possible, and honestly, nothing against hauppage, but using the same decoder side by side, no matter which, video looks better on the plextor, but to be fair, didn't use tools like hauppage tweak or anything to play with my PVR2 unit.
Great job to all of the developer's. Thank you for an outstanding product.
Although I have had issues, I have none that currently have not been resolved. With my current setup specifically, The MCE 2005 remote plugin gave me problems.
After setting everything up on my new system (old was a amd xp 1700 512g ram) after a recording, I could not change channels, I would have to restart the recording service. Then when the next recording was scheduled, it would not change channels until a system restart, and this cycled over and over. This is almost reminiscent of the issue with the hauppage remote and blaster issues I have read about. Not looking for a solution, I have since started using HIP, and that solved the issue. (Have since moved to the Time Warner DVR box, and now change channels using the firewire connection)
Other things that gave me a fit with this card to watch for, is that depending on how you load your software, if you use system default for a decoder in playback setup it may use divx, Netradio does not like this, and you have to toggle netradio to use windows media in the config.xml file, in order to get it to work. I also use the 2.3.0.5 driver downloaded from the Europe site instead of US, and did away with WinDVR software and instead left WinDVD Creator (as mentioned in the wiki), and loaded Plextools LE version 3.12 along with the lame_dshow encoder for MP3 audio instead of mpeg2 audio.
Removing WinDVR seems to have done away with the issue I was having where if I restarted the system, or came out of hibernation mode, gbpvr could not find channel 3, and just showed static until I went into WinDVR started it, shut it down, then restarted gbpvr.
Also in the capture card quality setting, medium seems to be the only setting to be able to choose, so I change the bitrate to deal with that instead of trying to get Low, High, to work.
To deal with timeshifting not working while capturing divx, I change it to mpeg2 and trancode to divx later, this method also allows me to use comskip, and comclean, or make a dvd for a friend. (I burn divx dvd's to play in my standalone divx player/dvd recorder as a standard).
These are just a few of the things that I have done to get my plextor unit running smoothly, which I used because I wanted to be able to fit a 4 hour race on dvd, sacrificing as little quality as possible, and honestly, nothing against hauppage, but using the same decoder side by side, no matter which, video looks better on the plextor, but to be fair, didn't use tools like hauppage tweak or anything to play with my PVR2 unit.
Great job to all of the developer's. Thank you for an outstanding product.