NOVA-T and PVR-150 Hardware Encoding

[Arthur]

I've been using a PVR-150 very successfully for few months now on a low spec PC (600MHz Pentium III) with Hauppauge's supplied software. As I understand it (and I don't really understand it that much, I'm afraid) the PVR-150 uses hardware encoding so the spec of the PC doesn't matter that much. I recently got hold of a cheap NOVA-T (post Aug 04) and would love to use it to record Freeview channels along with the PVR-150 and GBPVR.

What I got to wondering was if the NOVA-T will require much more CPU time than the PVR-150 - I believe the NOVA-T doesn't have hardware encoding - and if so, is it possible to use the hardware encoder on the PVR-150 to record the NOVA-T's signal via GBPVR?

I've searched for this topic in a many ways as I can think of and come up with very little, which makes me wonder if I've mis-understood something fundamental.

[alibert]

Hi,

the nova-t receives dvb - which is already mpeg. So there's no need to encode the signal, and so there won't be any cpu time for encoding.

-alibert

[cosmocat]

Freeview is broadcast as mpeg2 so the nova-t card doesn't need to do any encoding to put the video in this form like an analogue tuner would, it there already.
Slap the nova-t into a spare pci slot, download the latest drivers from hauppauge ( 2.1 or later, don't use 1.3 that may have arrived with the card ), set up the new recording source and epg guide and your good to go.

Regards

[Arthur]

Thanks alibert and cosmocat, I had a feeling I was missing something and you've confirmed that I was. I won't have to upgrade the old PC now, which is a relief (to my wallet at least :-).

[Arthur]

OK, so much installing and fiddling later and I'm more confused than ever.

Sure enough the Nova-T doesn't use much CPU when recoding via the recording service. LiveTV and playback performance is awful though, really jerky and stuttering. The thing that really confuses me is that I was getting really good live and playback results from the PVR-150 which is using software decoding too. Is the PVR-150s software decoder much better than the NOVA-Ts or am I misunderstanding this again?

[Chris.Day]

The PVR-150 receives analogue terrestrial, the Nova-t receives digital terrestrial - hence the difference.

Digital terrestrial is more susceptable to problems from poor aerial and cabling than analogue (well, the disturbances are more noticeable on digital - the signal's either there or it isn't; with analogue it can degrade gracefully).

[Arthur]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I don't think it's the quality of the signal that's the issue. Before getting hold of the Nova-t I was using an old Pace STB plugged into the PVR-150 via the STBs analogue out. The Pace and other DVB devices have given almost perfect reception. I used that setup as a digital recorder and second TV - mostly for footy, the quality was that good. I was hoping to put it all in the same PC with the Nova-t.

I was worried about the encoding CPU time with the Nova-t but understand why that's not an issue.

What I don't understand is why the PVR-150 seems to be so much better at decoding (30-40% CPU rather than 95-100% CPU) than the Nova-t. Surely they're both doing software decoding.

[Chris.Day]

Whichever software you use (e.g. GB-PVR) does the decoding, so the card or card type is irrelevant.

Are you saying that the PVR-150 gives you 30-40% CPU usage and the Nova-t gives you 95-100%? If that's the case it may be some kind of interrupt related issue - have you tried the Nova-t in another slot?

[d508dq]

Arthur,

I am looking at a similar set up. I currently have a PVR-150 working beautifully in a low spec P4 box. I want to add a digital tuner... trying to find out what problems I might have.

Have you had any luck working out what the issue is here?

Thanks