NPVR Support for WinTV HVR-1250?

[David B]

GBPVR will not work with the HVR-1250 because the card does not have a hardware decoder built in. Does NPVR have the same restriction?

I have a system with 4 of those cards and so am trying to find an alternative to throwing them away and buying models with the hardware decoder.

Thanks for your help.:confused:

[johnsonx42]

NPVR works fine with those cards, however you will need to install WinTV7 first in order to get the required SoftPVR components. There are some notes about that in the NPVR sticky, linked below. Be aware that software encoding uses the CPU to do realtime MPEG-2 encoding, so if you have 4 of them you'll need a multi-core CPU to do the heavy lifting.

It *MAY* also be possible to make them work with GB-PVR, but it is officially unsupported. Sub added limited support for soft-encoding Hauppauge cards in GB-PVR a couple of releases back, but maintained the support was 'expiremental' and continues to say GB-PVR requires hardware encoding. If you search the GB-PVR forum for HVR-1250 you may come across a thread containing the needed direct.ini entry to support those cards. You will of course need the Hauppauge SoftPVR software installed as well. That all said, NPVR is the only supported way to go if you want soft-encoded analog.

[Reddwarf]

NPVR works fine with those cards, however you will need to install WinTV7 first in order to get the required SoftPVR components. There are some notes about that in the NPVR sticky, linked below. Be aware that software encoding uses the CPU to do realtime MPEG-2 encoding, so if you have 4 of them you'll need a multi-core CPU to do the heavy lifting.

It *MAY* also be possible to make them work with GB-PVR, but it is officially unsupported. Sub added limited support for soft-encoding Hauppauge cards in GB-PVR a couple of releases back, but maintained the support was 'expiremental' and continues to say GB-PVR requires hardware encoding. If you search the GB-PVR forum for HVR-1250 you may come across a thread containing the needed direct.ini entry to support those cards. You will of course need the Hauppauge SoftPVR software installed as well. That all said, NPVR is the only supported way to go if you want soft-encoded analog.

Just to clear up things, it's not a MPEG DEcoder you need, it is an ENcoder. NPVR works with software encoder, but the quality stinks. Until Sub has added support for setting the encoding quality/bitrate it is not much to look at. However, we can hope it will improve in the future if enough people asks for it

[David B]

Thanks all for the quick responses and the link to the Getting Started sticky.

I'm still trying to figure my way around NPVR, but if it works with those cards I'll persevere until I have it figured out. (I really like GBPVR, so I'm assuming this will be as good or better. )

[johnsonx42]

NPVR works with software encoder, but the quality stinks. Until Sub has added support for setting the encoding quality/bitrate it is not much to look at.

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out; I've never actually used the analog side of any of these cards, and had forgotten that there are no quality settings available yet. I'm sure sub does plan to add such settings in the future. All I think is needed is a few settings in config.xml; having the ability to set quality per recording as GB-PVR had would be unnecessary these days - just pick a quality level and go with it.

[Reddwarf]

All I think is needed is a few settings in config.xml; having the ability to set quality per recording as GB-PVR had would be unnecessary these days - just pick a quality level and go with it.

Agreed.