Fed up with HVR1600

[johnnysocko]

I'm so sick of trying to get this card to work. It's always been a PITA. Now the recordings are shuddering.

All I want now is something to record my OTA ATSC digital programs. Does anyone know if the external HVR1950 works with NPVR? Any better relatively cheap solutions?

[johnsonx42]

For OTA ATSC you don't need anything so elaborate. The main reason to have a 1600 or 1950 is for hardware encoding of analog.

I have both the HVR-1250 (PCIe) and HVR-850 (USB) for my ATSC tuners. If I had to choose between them, I'd say the HVR-1250 is the best.

If you want an internal solution to fit the same PCI slot your 1600 is in, you can try the HVR-1150. I've not used one yet, but it should be roughly equal to the HVR-1250.

[johnnysocko]

For OTA ATSC you don't need anything so elaborate. The main reason to have a 1600 or 1950 is for hardware encoding of analog.

Don't need anything? Okay, that sounds nice. You tell me. I have a roof level antenna recently installed to receive HD OTA channels with the HD signal traveling throughout the house on the existing coax cable system. Works fine on 2 of 3 TVs. The TV without a compatible tuner I assume I purchased a DigitalStream pass through converter from Radio Shack and that works nicely.

My Desktop has housed this HVR1600 for a few years and I've periodically used in the past with the Verizon Motorola DCT700 STB. Since that is gone I just rerouted the coax cable into the ATSC input on the card, scanned for channels and it found 28 that I deemed worthy to watch. My primary recent goal in this little exercise however was just to use this 1600 in conjunction with possibly NPVR to record OTA programs. I don't have any other in house recording system in place. Is there a different approach you would suggest, or am I missing something obvious here?

The benefit to this approach for me was it was based on existing equipment and using experience I've already used in the past - same card, same software. Also, not having to worry about the IRBlaster which was rather unpredictable in the past. The jerky LiveTV and Recordings I didn't expect. That behavior I see both in WinTV and NPVR.

I don't need an internal solution - just want a solution that works.

Thanks for your interest.

[mikeh49]

I think johnson meant that you probably don't need a card that can tune both digital (ATSC) and analog. All OTA in the US is now digital, so analog would typically only be used for cable systems and STB analog outputs. Elaborate = both analog and digital tuners.

If you have jerky playback, we need more info - CPU/OS/video card. Also zip and attach your logs of a jerky playback event so we can see what decoders the system is using.

[johnnysocko]

Sorry for the terminology confusion.

Desktop Profile:
Core i7 CPU 975 @ 3.33 GHz
6 GB RAM
Win7 Home Premium SP1 64 Bit
NVIDIA GeForce GTX285

Zip archive attached. Has 3 logs related to one recording event from 12:59 to 1:30PM EST of Clifford, which is a very poor playback in VLC.

Also, a short LiveTV viewing in NPVR at 1:39PM which has some jerky behavior.

[pcostanza]

I confess my 1600 is getting long in the tooth. Some strange things are happening from time to time that I can't blame on NPVR......likely age. I don't rely on it as much nor do I use OTA but I never thought the quality of both analog and digital were up to the standards of the 2250. I have the USB 950 that works ok but rarely use that as well. Great picture quality on that one.

[mikeh49]

Nothing obvious to me in the logs. I'm not familiar with the Hauppauge AC3 decoder, but it's probably OK. Your system certainly has the horsepower to record and watch TV. Are you experiencing the jerky playback on the desktop system you describe above? Or another box that is playing the files from the desktop? Running anything else simultaneously? You might check Task Manager to see what the CPU load is while playing back.

If the files don't play well in VLC, there might be problem with the 1600. Someone probably can recommend a utility to look at the file and see if it has any problems.

Also, you'll probably get better support if you repost the symptoms and the logs in the NPVR Support forum.

[johnnysocko]

Well, thanks for looking. I may do some more sampling, and post some more logs in the support forum as you suggest.

The behavior is evident in LiveTV from NPVR or WinTV, so it isn't just a NPVR thing. Since I'm starting anew, I didn't want to waste my time worrying about the streaming aspect yet until I was comfortable with the recording - so yes, it is completely on this desktop.

I did trial-and-error replacing of the various decoders I have available and they all eventually exhibit the same behavior.

Back to my original question - assuming this could be the 1600 card itself - care to offer a suggestion of a not-too-expensive tuner solution to replace this bugger? I've already spent way more to unplug my fios TV than I was expecting, lol, but isn't that always the way it is. Should pay off in a year or two.

[mikeh49]

I use a Avermedia A188 Duet which has two digital tuners - works good for me after they replaced the board a year or so ago due to not waking up properly. I've also used a ATI Theater 650Pro successfully. I don't know if the Avermedia is still available - they were about $50 2 years ago. The ATI may still be available on ebay, I got one for $30 or so a year ago. (Just checked, $26 free shipping, or $997 for 40 of them.) The ATI comes in both PCI and PCIe versions and has an analog tuner with hardware encoding that you can ignore.

I went cheapo with these; Hauppauge have better support but cost more. Avermedia has never updated the driver for the Duet, but, then, they haven't needed to, at least in my experience. Both of these cards work fine on NPVR.

[johnsonx42]

Mikeh49's explanation of what I meant by elaborate is correct. By extension, by 'elaborate' I also meant 'expensive', thus I was answering the "Any relatively better cheap solutions" query. The HVR devices I mentioned cost around $50, while the HVR-1950 is over $100 I believe (and brings nothing to the table if you aren't doing analog). The HVR-1600 is well known to be flaky for many people, while I have been 100% happy with my HVR-1250 (in fact the only lament I've ever had is that I only have the 1 PCIe slot so I can't add another HVR-1250, and that I didn't just ante up for the dual-tuner HVR-2250).

By the way, none of these 'digital' cards preclude doing analog in the future: NPVR's support of Hauppauge's SoftPVR encoder is quite good, so as long as your system is reasonably powerful you can still record analog with good quality and non-excessive CPU use.