HVR-2250 and PVR-500 in same PC?

[robind]

Hi,

Does anybody have any experience with putting both a HVR-2250 and a PVR-500 in the same PC? I tried it over the weekend (so I could use one of the composite inputs of the 500 and keep both of the 2250's tuners handling QAM from the cable) and ran into troubles. Whenever the 500 is recording then there are severe CPU spikes, the recording has a lot of glitches and artifacts in it (even to the point of not being viewable) and the other apps on the machine suffer as well. If I take out the 2250 then the 500 does fine, and the 2250 does fine on its own as well.

The machine is running Vista x64 and has 4G of RAM. I tried lots of combination of drivers for both the 2250 and the 500, and the best seemed to be the latest beta drives for the 2250 and using the hauppauge_cd_3.4D1 drivers for the 500 instead of Vista's built in support for the card. But it was still not very usable. I was watching one video last night when a recording on the 500 kicked in and the one I was watching started pausing and skipping pretty bad, and the 500's recording had enough errors in it that it caused Sage to freak out when I tried to view it.

There is obviously some sort of conflict between the two cards, but I'm not sure where to look to try and diagnose it further or how to work around it, other than a trial and error approach. I'm trying to come up with ideas about what to try next and thought I would see if anyone in the community has had any experience with this combination or has other suggestions for me. The only thing I can come up with is to install XP instead and see if the two cards/drivers will play nicer together in that environment. I loose EVR and DirectX 10 (officially supported), but I gain the ability to fall back to my old PVR-USB2 (which has no x64 drivers) if the 500 still doesn't work.

Anybody have other suggestions?
TIA

[gplasky]

You need to have less than 4 GB of RAM in your machine. There is a known issue with some Hauppauge cards and 4 or more GB of RAM. I would suspect the PVR500 is the one causing the issue.

Gerry

[robind]

Originally Posted by gplasky

There is a known issue with some Hauppauge cards and 4 or more GB of RAM.

Thanks, that was it. I had seen the note about 4GB when I was hunting for drivers, but in my mind I saw it as "4GB or less", not "less than 4GB" so I didn't give it a second thought. This saved me a lot of work.

I plan on getting an HD-PVR in the near future and so I won't need the PVR500 in this machine any more and can put the 2GB DIMM back in then.

Robin

[scat]

If a machine is running Vista x64 and has a PVR-500 then the memory has to be less than 4GB. If there is 4GB or more then machine becomes unstable.

Hauppauge Computer Works
site link: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_mce.html

Note: Currently, the WinTV-PVR-150 and WinTV-PVR-500 receivers used with 64-bit versions of Windows are limited to less than 4GB of memory.

Note: I do remember reading that quote and it said 3GB before, so I removed 1Gb from my 4GB machine and haven't had any problems with my PVR-500.

Scat