Hauppauge HD PVR

[mvallevand]

The PCH can downconvert HD to SD, in fact that is how I am watching the Alps sample. Buying two seems simpler (No I don't get a commission)

Martin

[philly_phenom]

I'll give another codec a shot then - another poster indicated that ffdshow worked w/ the haali splitter (don't know if he used your patch or not).

This is odd - I downloaded ffdshow (still have haali splitter installed). Both with & w/o the patch, I get video no audio in gbpvr. Also video no audio in WMP.

However, on my notebook, I downloaded ffdshow & haali & WMP played the file like a champ sound & all (albeit a bit of stutter since it's only an AMD Turion 64 mobile).

I'm not sure what I'm missing - I used the default settings when installing haali & ffdshow on both machines.

[philly_phenom]

The PCH can downconvert HD to SD, in fact that is how I am watching the Alps sample. Buying two seems simpler (No I don't get a commission)

Martin

I think I didn't explain very well. I currently have two MVP's (which serve me very well in SD land). I'm planning to get a PCH for HD playback in the family room but it sounds like (short of buying a second PCH), I would have to record in standard mpeg-2 using the PVR-500 at the same time if I wanted to also watch the show in the bedroom.

I'm wondering if it's possible to record (for example) Lost at 10PM on WPVI channel 6 (using the PVR-500) AND on WPVI-DT channel 231 (using the HD-PVR) at the same time. That way i could watch the show in HD in the family room, but if I'm tired and want to finish up in the bedroom, i can.

[stangdaman]

So does anybody know if the playback of the recorded files can be off loaded to the new ATI cards(hd2400-hd2600).

There's a good article on Toms Hardware about H264 playback comparing the NVIDIA 8600 and 8400 and the ATI 2400 and 2600. I can't really take credit I found this courtesy of Miller over at byopvr.com

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/26/a...page3.html

They gave a pretty good review to the 2600XT in that regard and of course the nice thing about the ATI cards are the included codec. I'm sure the newer ATI 3000 series cards and NVIDIA 9000s offload it pretty well. Some of the older NVIDIA cards also claim H264 acceleration as well. I don't know how well they handle it. I know I tested my 7600GS out with the xbox 360 hd dvd player a while back and it handled that just fine. I don't think that all HDDVDs used H264 so that may be a little misleading but I didn't notice any problems with HD playback and I tried quite a few of them before I finally got rid of that drive.

[wtg]

You can download the Arcsoft Total Media Theatre intro version from http://www.arcsoft.com/products/totalmediatheatre/ and set the H.264 codec to Arcsoft in GBPVR. The decoder can continue to be used by GBPVR after the trial has expired.

Interesting, according to the Hauppauge website, this is the software that will be included with the device:

Bundled software applications

• Arcsoft “TotalMediaExtreme” for video capture, preview, playback, and authoring and burning your TV recordings onto a Blu-ray DVD compatible disc
  
• Arcsoft “TotalMedia Theater”, a video player so you can play back your TV recordings to your PC screen
  
• Arcsoft “MediaConverter” , to convert your HD recordings onto other formats

[whurlston]

Interesting, according to the Hauppauge website, this is the software that will be included with the device:

Bundled software applications

• Arcsoft “TotalMediaExtreme” for video capture, preview, playback, and authoring and burning your TV recordings onto a Blu-ray DVD compatible disc
  
• Arcsoft “TotalMedia Theater”, a video player so you can play back your TV recordings to your PC screen
  
• Arcsoft “MediaConverter” , to convert your HD recordings onto other formats

Yeah, I just noticed that today as well. And I just bought the software. Oh well. I got tired of issues with PowerDVD for HDM playback anyway.

[whurlston]

According to SHS on avsforum, preorders start sometime today (4/7/08). If anyone here gets there's before me, I trash the Netflix plugin. :p

[persim]

Didn't see it mentioned anywhere, but would this device support a cable box with 2 tuners? From what I can see it would only do one tuner. The only way to do the second would be to have a cable company DVR and then "offload" the recordings to your computer, thus defeating the idea of not using the cable company DVR. Does this sound right or am I way off?

[philly_phenom]

Didn't see it mentioned anywhere, but would this device support a cable box with 2 tuners? From what I can see it would only do one tuner. The only way to do the second would be to have a cable company DVR and then "offload" the recordings to your computer, thus defeating the idea of not using the cable company DVR. Does this sound right or am I way off?

You would need a second HD-PVR & cable box. From what I understand, you would need another means of controlling that box (unless it was a different model w/ different remote codes than the first).

I know there are users that have multiple boxes of the same model & control the channel changing via firewire.

[philly_phenom]

This is odd - I downloaded ffdshow (still have haali splitter installed). Both with & w/o the patch, I get video no audio in gbpvr. Also video no audio in WMP.

However, on my notebook, I downloaded ffdshow & haali & WMP played the file like a champ sound & all (albeit a bit of stutter since it's only an AMD Turion 64 mobile).

I'm not sure what I'm missing - I used the default settings when installing haali & ffdshow on both machines.

Update: I removed Arcsoft & now WMP works with ffdshow (it must have been trying to use the Arcsoft audio codec since the ffdshow audio codec tray icon never popped up before).

GBPVR just gives a blank screen - although I don't currently have sub's patch in. I might try that tonight if I have time. I always get nervous when trying out different codecs because I know Windows can get confused by multiple codecs. I backed up my C drive with Drive Image XML before starting this, so at least I can get back to where I was before this experimenting.

Does anyone know of a good codec info resource? I know what codecs & muxes are (less clear on what the haali splitter actually does - I assume it parses out the streams in a TS file), but I'm really interested in how they work at a low level.