Can't get PVR-150 Driver to start....

[bienduga]

Hi,

Just built this machine from scratch with Win2k SP4. Installed all the MSI MB drivers except the NVIDIA IDE drivers and any version of DirectX. Installed the video card drivers and no other utility except for SmartDoctor to monitor clock speed and such.

Tried the PVR-150 in all PCI slots and can't get the driver to run. There are no conflicts reported in device manager, but I get this message:

"This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)"

I then read on the PVR-150 site that could turn off hardware acceleration and then re-install the drivers. I did this for all PCI slots. Same (Code 31) message.

Has anyone have a fix for this?

I noticed that the PVR-150 seems to use interrupt 5 or 11 depending on the slot I use. There are other devices sharing those intterupts like USB 2.0 Hub and IDE channels, but no IRQ conflict is ever reported by device manager.

Help....

Tom.

[stefan]

You might find some people to help you at the forums on shspvr.com, if no one here can help you. Or you could try Hauppauge support...

[bienduga]

Ok. talked to hauppauge. Turns out a Win2000 update recently broke the original driver. I had to download the beta driver on their site along with cleaning up any oemXX.inf's related to hauppauge. Turns out a version of DirectX is required for the driver to install. My system was sqeaky clean to avoid problems and lack of DirectX created one for me. Also, got the IRBlaster working with WinTV2000 and WinTV2000 itself working. WinTV200 would bomb out if I had hardware acceleration turned on so it is now off. The picture quality in WinTV2000 isn't as good as I was expected running at a video resolution of 640x480. I'm assuming this is the WinTV2000 app and not the card. So now I press on with the GB-PVR install....

[stefan]

Great, you're on your way =)

The picture quality in WinTV2000 isn't as good as I was expected running at a video resolution of 640x480. I'm assuming this is the WinTV2000 app and not the card. So now I press on with the GB-PVR install....

The picture quality would depend on several things, but not on the app you are using. Neither wintv2000 nor gbpvr plays the files themselves, but instead they use a third party component to play back the file.

Let's go over the steps

First, you can set different quality levels for the card to capture in. Low level, bad picture quality. High level, good picture quality.

Second, you need a decoder to view the recorded mpeg movie. This would be the third party component I was talking about above. Different decoders are good at different things. You need to try different ones and decide which one works best for you. Different people seem to be "allergic" to different things, so there's no way of telling which decoder is the "best" decoder. It's a matter of taste.

Third, the display you are using. If you are using a computer monitor or a flat screen connected to your dvi output, you're probably good to go. Obviously a really crappy graphics card would affect image quality negatively, but not as much as if you use a tv set connected to, say, a composite out or s-video out on your graphics card. In that case the image quality can vary greatly depending on the quality of the tv-out component on your graphics card.