PVR-250 Problem

[fidget]

I know this may not be the best place to ask, but I figured that I'd give it a shot before getting in touch with Hauppauge. Before I get started, let me state that I believe that all of these problems are with the card or driver and not with SageTV.

I just put together a SageTV system (Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MB RAM, 120 GB HDD, XP Home) into which I installed three Hauppauge PVR cards, two PVR-250s and one PVR-350. When I record with the PVR-350, I get a MPEG-2 stream of the proper fidelity (approx 3 GB/hour) and is 640x480 in size. When I record a show using eother of the PVR-250s I get something very different.

The PVR-250s record an image that is 720x540 and looks like crap (approx 1.2 GB/hour). I have played with the cards that SageTV will use for recording in order to force the recording of shows on specific cards (removed all but the one I wanted to record). The PVR-250s also record at the 1.2 GB/hour rate no matter what I have asked SageTV to do.

I am using 1.4.5 beta for SageTV, but I doubt that is the problem. I have also upgraded to the latest Hauppauge drivers (hcwsmd03_21023.exe and pvr250_17_21188.exe). If I feel adventuresome next week, I may try to revert back to the drivers that came on the installation CD.

Here is an example of the bad capture. It's IronChef, sorry

Here is an example of the good capture

Any thoughts?

- Jonathan

p.s., removing the PVR-350 just yielded two cards that display bad pictures.

[fidget]

I was able to fix my problem and get multiple tuners working. I may have done more that necessary, but I have two working tuners (and hopefully a third very soon).

Basically, I removed everything having to do with my PVR-250s and 350 and did a scratch reinstall. I then updated to the drivers from from the shspvr site and everything seems to be hunky dory. I noticed that the driver install from Hauppauge doesn't seem to actually update the drivers, so even though I thought I was installing drivers that were NEWER than at shsprv, I was wrong.

- Jonathan

It appears as if the PVR-250 will not play with a PVR-350