Hauppage 1600 or Dvico Fusion 5 PCI

[ElroyJ]

I currenlty have a Dvico Fusion HDTV 5 USB. Have had it for a year or more and always have had some jerky playback with it. At times it was better than others.

I have decided to try a PCI card and get away from USB and was wondering what people thought between the Hauppage 1600 and the Dvico Fusion HDTV 5 RT Gold.

I will be using it for OTA HD tv only. I don't have cable so no QAM.

[tscales]

I have the Fusion USB and the Fusion PCI. Both give the exact same results. It isn't USB that is your problem, as I have THREE OTA HD USB tuners running at the same time. In my experience, it is a signal strength problem and switching to PCI won't help.

[Jakesty]

It's possible that it could be USB as he did not state if he had USB 1.1 or 2.0 support and that makes a huge difference.
I have the Avermedia A180 for HD and it has worked great from day one. My problem has always been signal strength from my amplified antenna which is on my floor right not and not in the attic or on the roof. If he's running USB 2.0 then I 100% agree that signal strength is the biggest problem people have with stuttering (perhaps outdated or poorly implemented drivers too).

Originally Posted by tscales

I have the Fusion USB and the Fusion PCI. Both give the exact same results. It isn't USB that is your problem, as I have THREE OTA HD USB tuners running at the same time. In my experience, it is a signal strength problem and switching to PCI won't help.

[tscales]

I suppose, although he would have gotten a big warning message when installing it that the port he was using would slow down the device. In fact, the specs require USB2.

[rooobosmith]

I have the Dvico 5 Gold PCI card and most of the time the playback is smooth.

Occasionally it is jerky and skips, but I have not figured out what causes it.

Signal strength is consistently good so I doubt that's it.

[ElroyJ]

Thanks for the replies. I watched a recorded show last night and there was only a couple or jerks. Much better than eairlier in the day. So then I got to thinking that it was both live and recorded stuff that sometimes was jerky.

My signal strength is really good (above 90% on all channels, double wide antenna on the roof) so it is not that.

I have USB 2.0.

I upgrade to the latest drivers for the Dvico and after that it was really jerky, but later on it was better, thats why I thought to ask the question.

Now I am thinking about upgrading the Video Card. This would be more of a pain to change. I currently have an NVidia 6600Gt running 84.37 drivers and connected using Componant outputs and AGP. After watching last night when it was better I am not sure if I should upgrade anything, but would still like to get rid of the ocasional jerk. Does everyone have an ocassional jerk say 5 or less an hour?.

Do you think this would be a better upgrade??

If I changed the video card I would possably go to a ATI HD2400 which supports componant and AGP.


I am running XP Pro, Pentium 3.0 Ghz, 1Meg ram with an ASUS P4C800E motherboard. 300Gb Hd and 160Gb Hd. BTV 4.6

[Jakesty]

Replacing your video card will not make the difference. I run the same as do many others with lesser cards and it works fine. Search the boards for drive configurations and such as throughput is possibly a reason, also fragmentation (which I don't condone defragging). More likely it's your tuner and drivers. Sometimes newer drivers are the problem too, so consider downgrading.
I get no more than one stutter an hour of recording, so 5 I'd say is excessive.

[ElroyJ]

Thanks for replying. After tweaking for probably a year, instead of changing the capture device or the video card with what replies I got here, I decided to reformat the data hard drive with 64k clusters and this has solved the jerky problem.

No jitters or jerkiness at all. Watched a recording of Greys Anatomy and Desperate Housewives.