Hauppauge PVR-250 Driver version question

[Steerpike]

I've been happily using a Hauppauge PVR-250 with Sage for over a year. I decided to build a new box recently, and bought a new PVR-250 card. The CD that came with the card has newer driver versions, so I figured I should go with them, but now I'm seeing very weird video corruption on my recordings (not all, but some) so I'm wondering if I should install the older versions.

In device manager, the Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II (Encoder) properties shows a driver of
Old (working well) machine: 1.18.21.22266 dated 9/22/2004
New (working bad) machine: 1.18.21.23257 dated 9/14/2005

The Hauppage website also seems to have this newer version as the latest available, although they refer to it as simply 'Name: pvr250_driver_118_23257.zip'.

I'm about to uninstall this latest driver unless anyone has any better suggestions.

The video corruption is hard to desribe, but it's as if there are missing I frames in the MPEG stream. If I just play through the material 'normallly', it looks 'sort of' ok, but if I start going backwards and forwards in my editor (womble MPEG-VCR) the image very quickly degrades to a complete mess - like an oil painting hit by a flame thrower...

I did some test recordings Sunday and they were fine; I then scheduled a recording Monday and it had this corruption issue. I scheduled a second one Tuesday and it was fine; I scheduled a third one today and it was bad again - so it's not consistent. All used the exact same settings. Since it's not consistent, it's really hard to test! Watching live TV always seems fine.


Any help greatly appreciated! Thanks, Chris

[Steerpike]

yuk - I first downgraded to the old drivers, but no change.

I then swapped the new card with the old card, and used the latest drivers with both, and the problem followed the new card. So it seems I either have a defective card, or, I need some updates for the new card that are not on the CD or the Hauppauge website.

Here's some samples of frames I see when single-stepping BACKWARDS through a recording. Playing forward looks much better, but is not perfect; going backwards highlights the problem.



and


and


Any thoughts?

[Steerpike]

Totally weird - I installed the new card in my old box, and the problem still happened. Then I played around on the new box - I changed quality from DVD Standard play to DVD Long Play and then DVD Extra Long Play, and the corruption disappeared. Then I set it back to DVD Standard Play - and it was still fine. So then I put the new card back into the new box, changed quality settings from std->long->extra, then back to std - and now, the recordings are fine! I cannot get the problem to re-occur.

The only remaining test is to reboot the machine, and see if it returns after a reboot. Logically, I would expect it to do so.

I guess the lack of interest in this post is because no one is buying the old capture cards any more, everyone is going with HD? I must have Closed Caption support, and the PVR-250 is the only card I know about that supports CCs.