PVR-350 TV-Out Menus

[scubaker]

I am thinking of building a PVR and I want to use a cheap old box (P2 or P3) and put as little into it as possible. My goal is to just have it hiding behind the TV, so I don't care what it looks like.
Right now I am thinking about getting the Hauppauge PVR-350, primarily because of the TV-out feature, but I have read a couple of reviews that say the on screen menus do not show up on the TV. As I am not planning to have a monitor set up to this box, this is a problem. The review I read also said that the problem was being worked on.
Does anyone know if this issue has been resolved yet, or if there are any other fixes available?

[cameluk]

Right now I am thinking about getting the Hauppauge PVR-350, primarily because of the TV-out feature, but I have read a couple of reviews that say the on screen menus do not show up on the TV. As I am not planning to have a monitor set up to this box, this is a problem.

GB-PVR shows its own menu on the TV via the 350 , but you won't see the windows desktop on the TV. I use VNC if I want to gain access to Windows on my PVR from another PC

[stefan]

The review you read must have been for some other software. Using gbpvr it will work. There is some other software out there too (sage?), but most will not show any on screen menus.

[sleptoor]

In response to your PII / PIII box question - I use a PVR 350 in a well optimized PIII 800 with 796 MB Ram (actually just upgraded to a Celereon 1000) but I would not advise going below these specs. While watching live TV it is pretty flakey. I attrbiute it to the fact that the PC can often hit 100% CPU usage. As a Digital VCR it works great and the CPU usage is quite low (~10-20%). I can check email and not have hiccups.

And since I've gotten the remote working without having focus I've been thinking of disconnecting the monitor all together and just accessing it via VNC like above.

[isgdre]

I have GB-PVR running on a Intel Celeron 466 Mhz with only 128meg of ram (60 gig hard drive) with a wintv PVR 350 using tv-out. Much like you talk about.

I don't understand why people have so much trouble and state that you have to have PIII 800 with 796 MB Ram and such. My video output is always fine and not broken or studddderrry. Maybe I should point out that I never watch live tv anymore. But do record and watch other recordings at the same time just fine.

On the other hand the slow computer has these problems.

1) going around in the menus is slow. you press a key on the remote and it takes about 1-2 seconds for it to respond. What's more of a pain is that there is only a one key type ahead. So, you press two keys and wait, press the next two and wait... Not that much fun.

2) System crashes when a background recording starts/stops and your moving around in the menus. This was also a problem on my 2.4gig PIII with 1 gig of ram. But on the fast computer it only crashed the computer when the cpu was also busy. So, it happened less offten but it caused much more problems when it did. That's why I went to the slow (dedicated) one.

3) Sometime when your watching a show the screen will suddenly turn red. The computer is still running but the output is lost. I set it up so as soon as I exit GB-PVR the computer reboots and restart it so it's not that much of a problem.

For items 2) and 3) I have posted these on this form before to no resolution. I was told to get a faster computer (like 2.4gig wasn't fast enough) or that it's a problem with the WinTV pvr 350 driver even though it works fine with it's supplied software.

[isgdre]

oops that was way more long winded then I intended.
Yet I should add. There may be a difference between Intel and AMD. I'm not an expert in MicroCode but It seems to me that I remember hearing somthing about MMX code being good for multi-media. I know now a days with 2.x-4.x gig computers it's not an issue but for older ones (like you talked about) it may be the difference between 477 p2 working ok and 800 p3 clone sputtering.

[sleptoor]

Just to clarify, on my Celeron 1000 the menus are very quick (almost no delay), only loading the TV guide takes about 15 seconds (first time). And you probably don't need 796 megs of RAM but if your running XP anything less than 512 is a bad idea anyhow. As a DVR my PVR350 and GBPVR never crash while being used (even when watching while recording).

Anything you can do to limit the CPU load on these systems only improves the Experience of using them. Its the old addage the faster the better....

[scubaker]

In response to your PII / PIII box question - I use a PVR 350 in a well optimized PIII 800 with 796 MB Ram (actually just upgraded to a Celereon 1000) but I would not advise going below these specs. While watching live TV it is pretty flakey. I attrbiute it to the fact that the PC can often hit 100% CPU usage. As a Digital VCR it works great and the CPU usage is quite low (~10-20%). I can check email and not have hiccups.

And since I've gotten the remote working without having focus I've been thinking of disconnecting the monitor all together and just accessing it via VNC like above.

I thought the decoder on the PVR 350 took the load of the CPU when watching live TV? Why would it be up around 100% CPU usage if the decoder is doing most of the work?

Another question, I assume the answer is yes, but I just thought I would make sure. Does the remote that comes with the PRV 350 work well with GBPVR?

[isgdre]

Yes, My pvr 350 came with a 45 key remote.

[stefan]

If you're not using tv-out on the 350, the decoder will not be used. Meaning that if you want to use your computer's tv-out, or use your computer's monitor for watching the recordings, then you'll need software (and also the cpu) to decode the recordings.

Regarding the remote, I got a silver remote with my 350, and it works well with gb-pvr.