Freak Enterprises

Hauppauge’s WinTV-PVR 350 web site

So now that I have MediaPortal running on my PC-under-the-TV I wanted to see if adding a TV capture card would provide me a PVR to rival my beloved Tivo. I was also keen to have a remote control to control MediaPortal instead of using the wireless querty keyboard that clutters up our lounge. The recommendation from the main MediaPortal developer was to go for a capture card that included an onboard MPEG encoder such as the WinTV-PVR 350. I did a bit of looking around and Amazon seemed to be offering the best price at £117.83 and free postage. Two days later it arrived.

Features and functions : 8
The WinTV-PVR 350 is a standard PCI card. It’s main features are hardware MPEG 1/2 encoder and decoder, analogue TV tuner and analogue radio tuner. It also includes some cables, a fairly conventional remote control and a remote control receiver magic-eye. In the software, there is the main TV viewer and recorder application, a scheduler, a radio player, Teletext viewer and a basic video editor. Installation was easy and I had the card up and running very quickly. Everything works extremely well, the picture quality using the supplied TV viewer is great and the radio is an unexpected bonus. The best thing is that even with a TV window open filling most of the screen you can use other applications without any impact on overall performance of the machine and no jumps or video glitches – very smooth.

My first niggle came when I tried to update the drivers and software from Hauppauge’s web site. According to the MediaPortal web site you must the absolute latest drivers for the PVR350 for it to work correctly with MediaPortal. The Hauppauge web site also says that you must have the latest software applications to use the latest drivers. So I had a lots of individual downloads to do. The driver itself was distributed in two pieces; a base driver and then a patch to bring it up to the latest version. I went through the pretty complicated install instructions for this new driver, rebooted, went into the Windows Device Manager, found the properties tab for the card’s driver and then found that the driver version was exactly the same as when I started. I repeated the whole procedure a number of times but still the result was the same. So I think I have the latest drivers but I can’t be sure…

I had a few problems getting MediaPortal to tune the TV stations at first but a newer version of MediaPortal soon fixed that. To get the remote to control MediaPortal I had to install some freeware IR software and then edit a MediaPortal key-mapping file. Luckily the instructions to do this were all on the media portal forums.

After a couple of days of playing around with the card I noticed that my usually near-silent little PC-under-the-TV had become quite noisy. It seems that the PC was now running a lot hotter so the PC’s fan was having to work extra hard. It became so noisy at times that we had to keep turning up the TV volume to hear it properly. The problem with noise is worse still when you are doing real time encoding and the disk is continually being access and producing even more heat. Oh dear, this is a major problem. The only way I can justify to my wife that we have a PC in the lounge is that it be discrete. The noise the whole thing now makes when real time encoding to disk is far from discrete ! Now I can’t blame this directly on the card, my requirements are quite special, although my Tivo also includes a realtime MPEG2 encoder and it runs almost silently.

Ease of use : 7
Install and set up was very easy and the card worked first time. The software is a bit of a mixed bunch and could be a lot easier to use. It looks like each application has come from different software company, with very different looks and feels. The look and feel of the TV viewer in particular is overly complicated, with tiny little buttons that aren’t always obvious exactly what they do.

Looks and style : 5
Nothing really stands out as being very stylish, including the remote control, magic eye and the overly complicated software.

Build quality : 8
Build quality seems OK but I am worried about the long term effects of all the extra heat the card produces.

Value for money : 9
I have to say I was quite excited about having the ability to do real time MPGE2 encoding. I played with this sort of technology a few years back when a real time MPEG encoder was a very specialist piece of equipment and very expensive. So to get a real time MPEG2 encoder for under £120 just shows how far video technology has moved on in just a very short space of time.

Day-to-day impact : 2
The extra noise is a big, big problem. The PC-under-the-TV in the lounge must be silent. I can’t see the PVR350 living in that machine for much longer.

Overall Rating : 2 + 9 + 8 + 5 + 7 + 8 = 65%
I read somewhere about a project to stream an mpeg encoded TV stream across a network. Maybe the answer is to have the card in another machine upstairs and stream the video across the network to the PC-under-the-TV – watch this space.