Recording from a PVR500 in widescreen?

[Mahoney]

I am capturing the output from a set-top box via the S-Video in of a Hauppauge PVR500 using Sage. The set-top box is kicking out a PAL 16:9 signal - so ideally I would be capturing at 576x1024. Then everything would know how to play back my recordings. Unfortunately everything gets captured at 576x768. I've created a new recording quality as so:

mmc/python2_encoding/WideDVD=videobitrate\=4500000|width\=1024|height\=576|audiobitrate\=224|vbr\=1|peakvideobitrate\=6000000

And chosen it, but no go. Is this just a limitation of the PVR500? Or is there a way to make it do what I want?

Thanks!

[paulbeers]

While I am no Pal expert, but the PVR500 is an SDTV only capture card which from my understanding is that it is only going to do 576x768. I also could be mistaken, but I have a feeling your set top box is probably only outputting 576x768 thru svideo also? In the states obviously we use NTSC and here if you use the svideo from a set top box, my understanding, is that it will only output 480x720 whether it is an hd stb or not. Someone else can verify that.

[Mahoney]

An analogue signal only has a number of horizontal lines; how many vertical lines you split it into is pretty much up to the receiver. The set top box is set to output a signal designed to be interpreted as widescreen SDTV - so 576 horizontal lines as usual for PAL SDTV, but should be shown over 1024 vertical lines.

So it's not a question of the signal or of the PVR500 only being an SDTV capture card; it's just whetehr the PVR500 is capable of recording to widescreen SDTV rather than only to 4:3 SDTV. At the moment I get everything vertically stretched because it's recording the whole signal but to a 4:3 dimension.