Hauppauge HD PVR on May 1

[wtg]

Really to keep this on topic, since the PCH plays the files that the HD PVR creates and the MVP doesn't I'm not sure the lack of com skip is even valid even assuming you have found a good simple com skip file for the HD PVR captures.

Has anyone else tried playing back an SD capture from the HD PVR on the PCH? When I did this I found that the aspect ratio wasn't maintained... the recording was stretched out to fill the entire screen, and since it was an SD broadcast on an HD TV, everyone looked fat. Not good.

I've not yet had time to fully investigate but I suspect that the recording does not have the correct aspect ratio... maybe the display aspect ratio? SD captures from my other cards playback fine on the PCH, so it's not a PCH problem, though I wish it allowed more configurability of the aspect ratio during playback like VMR on a PC does.

I hope to have more time to play this weekend.

[thisisnotadrill]

So i had recordings set for all of yesterday. no live preview, just the GBPVR recording service working in the background. all the recordings were successful. i've got it set to record crap all day today as well just to test. at any rate.

I am having some trouble with SD recordings just being really weird (blueish hue, not centered, having some HD frame in there as well...). i have to use graphedit this weekend to find out if its an encoding or decoding problem though.

[mvallevand]

Has anyone else tried playing back an SD capture from the HD PVR on the PCH?

Could you provide me with a small 15 Mb sample to my email address or some other location?

Martin

[wtg]

Could you provide me with a small 15 Mb sample to my email address or some other location?

I no one else beats me to it, I'll send you one tomorrow or late this evening. At work now and plans with the lady this evening...

[zed]

I recorded several hours of stuff overnight on different channels in both HD and SD and so far it has worked just fine, It has been quite seamless so far. The SD looks a bit fuzzy but that could just be that SD *IS* a bit fuzzy . Aspect looks fine. The HD recordings look good but not quite as good as directly from the STB over HDMI but I guess that's to be expected.

I'm recording on my server box and watching on the PCH. I'm using my MCE IR blaster to change channels, not the HD-PVR blaster. I haven't tried watching live TV but I don't normally watch live TV over GB-PVR so it's not really an issue for me.

The only issue I have so far is that I can't watch the recordings on my GB-PVR client boxes. All I get is a black screen and GB-PVR locks up. I have to use Task Manager to kill it. I believe it's a decoder/config issue that I'll have to figure out (or is it?).

So far it has worked pretty much as I hoped/expected.

[thisisnotadrill]

By default the SD recording quality is a bit lower than HD. you might try going into the analogHD.ini file in the GBPVR folder and changing the bitrate for SD sources to something higher and see if that bit of fuzziness you notice goes away or if its really just the SD source

[philly_phenom]

By default the SD recording quality is a bit lower than HD. you might try going into the analogHD.ini file in the GBPVR folder and changing the bitrate for SD sources to something higher and see if that bit of fuzziness you notice goes away or if its really just the SD source

Still sitting on its side? I've been out of town (and will be for a few more weeks), so I haven't been able to touch it since Monday. It's reassuring to see that you have it working so well.

[mvallevand]

I no one else beats me to it, I'll send you one tomorrow or late this evening. At work now and plans with the lady this evening...

You were first so here are the results the PCH definitely sees it is identified 720x480 16:9 but zoomed on a 4:3 screen with the PCH it looks correct. Rather then using the zoom key on the PCH I would check the modes on the TV.

Martin

[rschult298]

i have been having the same freezing problems like everyone else then i decided to just change the resolution from 1080i to 720p on my directv h20
and captured with arcsoft ,the preview actually plays kinda smooth and the capture plays great in mpc compared to unwatchable in 1080i.maybe it just cannot handle 1080 yet.

[wtg]

You were first so here are the results the PCH definitely sees it is identified 720x480 16:9 but zoomed on a 4:3 screen with the PCH it looks correct. Rather then using the zoom key on the PCH I would check the modes on the TV.

Yeah, I think I tried that and the TV wasn't giving me a good option either. The TV can stretch a picture to fill the entire screen, but it doesn't have an option to pillarbox a widescreen picture. Since the PCH is outputting it as widescreen, there's not much I can do. Additionally, I found some mention on the NMT forums that the engineers don't intend to add many options for controlling aspect ratio either, but intend to simply honor the aspect ratios defined in the file.

The problem is with the HD-PVR. There doesn't seem to be any aspect ratio information encoded with capture, and so the playback device just assumes it's 1:1, so a 720x480 capture is 16:9. GSpot doesn't show any aspect data... no display aspect ratio (DAR), pixel aspect ratio (PAR) or SAR. Other Hauppauge capture cards correctly encode a display aspect ratio of 1.333:1 with their 720x480 captures so the PCH and other playback devices know how to display is properly.

Hopefully it's something Hauppauge will fix.