newbie: npvr basics?

[dianedebuda]

Assuming I should start with npvr instead of gv-pvr. Have scanned forum post titles and wiki, but don't see rudimentary info for the neophyte. Things like minimum cpu, memory, supported tuners, etc. Happy to post what I have, but if I'm just missing this info, it'd be better to have someone direct me to the "proper" spot.

I expect that I'm going to have a huge learning curve to move from (manually scheduled) mpg2 captures using ATI MMC (ATI AIW). Actually doing (manually scheduled) h264 captures since Jan with Arcsoft TotalMedia (HD-PVR). Get Schedule Direct xml --> Access 97 --> Excel 97 to select movies based on what's new & what I already have. Quite satisfied with that setup. Now want to be able to capture/time-shift mostly network stuff in HD, so looking at npvr. Have ATI 650, ATI 550, and KWorld ub-435q tuners currently available. Several older computers, but what's minimum cpu/memory/graphics card etc for HD?

[johnsonx42]

At this point, yes, you probably should just go with NPVR instead of GB-PVR. NPVR isn't perfect yet, but GB-PVR is dead (and still imperfect).

I don't think anyone has sorted out what the hardware minimums are. As with many things the answer to that question is "it depends...". You don't need much CPU at all for recording digital HD; all it does is write the digital stream verbatim from the broadcaster. For HD playback you need a decent video card, but nothing fancy. I use an ATI HD4550, others use HD3450's and 8600GT's (that said I actually do get tolerable HD playback on a notebook using Intel i915 integrated graphics... that's not a recommendation, just an example of how low you can go). For memory, I guess I'd say 1Gb, though even 512Mb should probably work ok.

All 3 tuners you mentioned are supported for digital HD, as is the HD-PVR.

You may want to list out the best spare hardware you can come up with and see what the comments are.

There is a thread linked in my sig that may give you some help getting started.

[dianedebuda]

Thanks for quick response. My target hardware is an HP A8AE-LE (AmberineM) socket 939 with Athlon 64 x2 3800, 2 GB mem, XP MCE, video is Gigabyte HD4550 1GB mem using 8.7 drivers. No idea what equivalent ATI Catalyst is; tried direct load of Catalyst but got "not ATI" card type msg. Would be nice to also be able to use an HP K8S-LA (Salmon) socket 745 with Athlon 64 3200, 2 GB mem, XP MCE, video ATI x1650 pro 512MB - that's what I'm using for HD-PVR captures but with 768 mem. These machines are fresh loads of XP fully updated except .net 4 at this point. Anyone have suggestions on 650/550 driver versions? Leaning towards the Theater 9.12 instead of the "current" 10.4.

I did see your Start thread before my orig post, but a lot the info there is post-install and I'm not to that point yet. I just thought I was missing a "requirements" area. I did note some of the needed software on the first page. Will be reading that again in depth. When I looked at GB-PVR much earlier this year, seems like there were required codecs & graphs that confused me (mostly because there were so many & I didn't/don't know enough about choices and sources). But I may be remembering something else...

Has nothing to do with GB-PVR or NPVR, but I tried WatchHDTV a long time ago (before I bought my HD-PVRs) and now it seems to have died/stagnated. Anyone know what happened to it? Just curious.

[johnsonx42]

Either of your systems should be pretty satisfying for NPVR, but obviously the 939 system with the HD4550 card will be better (you may notice from my sig that's pretty much what my system is). Even that x1650 Pro ought to do ok (a couple years ago I got pretty nice HD from an ATI 9600, and the x1650 is two generations past that). I'm not sure why you're getting that message from the Catalyst installer; I was under the impression that catalyst ought to load on any desktop system with a radeon card... it's only notebooks where you often have to get vendor-specific versions of the driver. You might try completely uninstalling any gigabyte version of the driver, then install Catalyst.

[dianedebuda]

I didn't expect to see a problem either using the ATI drivers. Many moons ago, ATI drivers were only for "built by" ATI boards, but think that was changed several years ago. Have long experience playing with Catalyst driver versions & MMC versions to get the "right" combo; once found, it was a rock solid system. That's why I'm wondering what versions of display/tuner drivers folks here are using. Still looks like ATI based hardware is very good, but drivers are very touchy and a PIA to set-up.

[McBainUK]

Things like minimum cpu, memory, supported tuners, etc. Happy to post what I have, but if I'm just missing this info, it'd be better to have someone direct me to the "proper" spot.

A start: http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?...requisites

[dianedebuda]

Wow, McBainUK. After looking at that page, I realized I *had* seen it already, but it just didn't register - guess I'd looked at too many wiki pages & posts and forgot. Or maybe the "modern video card" sounded too vague and made me discard it from memory. Whatever. But that was what I was looking for. Duh. Finger-to-head gun. Bang.

Still like to know what drivers folks are using for my video/tuners though. Think I'll restore my system to pre-driver install status & retry the ATI 10.2 video and Theater 9.12 drivers then give npvr a shot today.

Thanks.

[johnsonx42]

I guess I'm just not sure why you're worrying so much about driver versions. There's rarely any reason to use anything but the latest version unless you have some specific issue that was broken in the latest release.

[dianedebuda]

Many years of experience with ATI drivers taught me to be very wary 'cause there are many very buggy versions that are released. For example, my HD4550 wouldn't load with the Catalyst 10.2 drivers - got "Setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware operating system". According to the ATI site, that and 10.9 (10.10 today) were what was available for the card. The release notes for 10.9 said the WDM package (needed for XP) was not included but available elsewhere on AMD. No link & couldn't find. That's why I tried 10.2. This time, after getting a 10.2 install failure, tried 10.9 & they loaded ok. Weird, but standard for ATI. Also, I've seen ATI actually replace a release and not give it a new release number. So I'm kind of always hoping for the best but expecting trouble with their drivers.

[johnsonx42]

That certainly hasn't been my experience except on rare occaisions or when dealing with somewhat odd-ball cards like AGP versions of PCIe-only radeons (which use an AGP bridge chip that isn't quite fully compatible with the normal drivers). But I've loaded drivers on hundreds of different systems, so any bad luck in a few instances gets overwhelmed by the general 'just-works' success rate on the majority. I suppose it's true that there's always some little niggle with some feature, but even at that level I've found AMD's drivers have been very good in the last couple of years.