Experience with different Hauppauge Drivers

[Watter]

I had the opportunity to work with a relatively clean installation on my OS and SageTV today and I thought I'd relate one particular experience.

My hardware:
Asus A7N8X (nforce2)
Seagate Baracuda 200GB
(separate OS and video storage partitions)
PVR-350
GeForce4

Relavent SageTV settings:
350 TV-Out: Enabled
350 UI: Enabled:
Hardware Decoding Only: Enabled

For IR, I'm using Girder.

I started with the drivers from the shspvr.com site. These seemed to work decently, but I felt like every click of the remote which changed the UI had a tiny pause in it. For instance skipping around within a video made this pause pretty apparent. Another example is hitting Home to return to the main menu and then down a few times. Each move caused a small hitch. It was hardly noticible, but as picky as I am, still quite annoying.

I cleaned up the drivers with hwclear and installed the latest drivers from the Hauppauge site. No pause. Moving around the UI and within videos was noticibly smoother.

Just to make sure it wasn't my inagination, I cleared the driver again and resinstalled the shspvr.com drivers and yep, the pause was back.

So, I guess my question is if there is any good reason to be using the shspvr.com drivers over the ones from the Hauppauge site? I saw Dan specifically reccomend the the drivers from shspvr.com so I'm a little nervous about using the older ones from Hauppauge, but the resposivness difference is pretty significant in my opinion.

Opinions?

-Watter

[gplasky]

Please reference the driver version numbers you used fromm SHS and Happauge. SHS usually has the latest versions (beta) from Happague packaged for a very easy installation. These are usually located in the forum and not from the usual download area. I got bit on one beta version awhile back but for the most part the latest ones in the forum usally end up a little better than the Happauge ones.


Gerry

EDIT: For instance the latest ones from SHS are 1.8.22035 but I didn't have a chance to load or test them yet.

[Watter]

The downloaded Hauppauge file reads: pvr250_17_21288.exe

The SHS files were labeled:
hcw1_8_22020_pp2

-Watter

[krutaw]

Originally posted by Watter
The downloaded Hauppauge file reads: pvr250_17_21288.exe

The SHS files were labeled:
hcw1_8_22020_pp2

-Watter

That's very interesting. I'm using the hcw1_8_22020_pp2 drivers and have nothing but trouble with SAGETV 2.0 (all versions.) I will try backing it down to the Hauppauge drivers instead to see if the problem goes away.