Possible PVR350 breakdown

[bgowland]

I have a problem with recordings made on my PVR350. I origanally thought it was one of the tuners on my 500 but was getting confused with device IDs etc.

Basically I get 'super bright' recordings (see attached) and a shimmering across the screen. If you look at the lefthand side of the screenshot where the guy is bending forward you can see a small 'blip' and on the other side a corresponding indent shaped like a '<'. These shimmers happen constantly several times a second but the shot only captered one.

I 'think' this all ties in when I used the Hauppauge Tweak tool to adjust some PVR500 settings but it messed up my 350 instead (the picture went very dark with a strong red tinge). The problem is, I've used the tool again to restore defaults, tried an HCWCLEAR and full re-install of drivers, a full power-down and card removal (in case the card was holding the settings) but to no avail.

The alternative, of course, is the tweak tool thing is just a coincidence and a component or components on the 350 have 'broken down' but haven't yet totally failed.

Opinions/ideas gratefully received.

Cheers,
Brian

[sub]

You could try running regmon from sysinternals.com, then play with the tweak tool to see what registry settings it is change. Hopefully that'll give you some clues as to what settings need to be restored to defaults or reset.

[bgowland]

Thanks - I'll try that when I get some time.

I built a live TV graph and tweaked the ProcAmp as I went along - I managed to get something that looked OK but I don't think the settings will survive a reboot.

I'm still getting the horizontal blip/shimmer things although they're not as noticable when the picture isn't so bright. It looks like interference of some sort but switching my cooling fans to different speeds didn't make any difference - I'm wondering if it's the PSU that's causing it. Funny how the PVR500 seems to be fine though - maybe the 350 does have some degraded components after all.

Maybe time to make that change to digital-only...or retire my 350 at least. Shame really - it was my first capture card and what led me to GB-PVR.

Cheers,
Brian

[zaphod7501]

I don't know if the settings still work with the newer drivers, but WinTvCap can also control the PVR350 from command line arguments and has numerous settings in the ini file for brightness as well as other parameters. WinTvCap will not even see the 500 card so it is fairly easy to test the 350 with it.
http://www.shspvr.com/tools.html

I wouldn't try to run GB-PVR at the same time since there can be some odd interactions. I was recording on a 250 with WinTvCap and GB-PVR changed the channel without WinTvCap knowing it. I ended up with a recording that changed stations in the middle.

You would probably at least want to restart the GB-PVR recording services after experimenting with WinTvCap.

[bgowland]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've got a lot going on at the moment so the 'quick fix' is that I've taken the 350 out of the loop for the moment. I'll have a look at WinTVCap when I can.

Cheers,
Brian

[sub]

I don't know if the settings still work with the newer drivers, but WinTvCap can also control the PVR350 from command line arguments and has numerous settings in the ini file for brightness as well as other parameters.

You can also set the same settings in direct.ini if you need to.

[zaphod7501]

You can also set the same settings in direct.ini if you need to.

The direct.ini settings will also be more likely to work with all driver versions. My thought on WinTvCap was to modify the PVR350 recordings without changing any characteristics of the PVR500 recordings. Basically an independent test of the 350 and it's drivers since I believe the 350 uses different drivers than the 500.