Should have read the FAQ

[tjdmobile]

uh-oh. A little fear setting in here. I purchased this today, and consulted the forum when a problem cropped up. I have a Win2000SP3 system, P4-2.4ghz with Hauppauge WintvPVR-250. This card has been a top performer with Sage and Wintv2000. I just noticed something interesting...NO VBR SUPPORT when recording. I don't have the know-how to check into the graph while recording to see what is happening, but this is a major flaw. The point of a hardware encoder is the abiltiy to do real VBR recordings. This is of paramount importance, becuase you can have a VBR recording that peaks at 9mbps, with an average of 4mbps and have full DVD quality with little bandwidth. How does PVS get the video from the Hauppauge? In other programs it goes from the chip to disk, then back to the application.

The reason I am here right now is because when I record using DVD High res, the resulting file crashes my DVD authoring software (Ulead), and Cyberlink DVD player will crash on it as well. A very attractive feature of this application is the background re-encode to PPC compatible files, but lack of VBR support means that my episodes of Stargate will lose much of their detail because I can't give it the horsepower it needs (lack of VBR to mention again)

Is this product going to support VBR in the very short term, because I am having flashbacks of the limitations of my ATI AIW Radeon all over again, and I really don't want to have to try to get my money back.

Please help,

TJD

[rkuo]

I'm not sure what we could be doing that would make the resulting file crash your applications. We pull the MPEG from the card and that's it.

Regarding VBR support, as far as I know it's probably just a simple flag to set (i.e. it should be really easy). I'll give it to someone to look at for the 3.2 point release.

[honer123]

The point of a hardware encoder is the abiltiy to do real VBR recordings

No, the point of a hardware encoder is to take all of the encoding off of the processor. VBR is a bonus to have, and it will be great to have, but cool your jets and let them put it in. Support for this card has only been availible for one month with Snapstream. It works pretty good for that short amount of time.
I am quite happy with CBR until 3.2 or 3.3 supports VBR.
Honer

[RobertH]

you might want to open this link and get the latest drivers for the pvr250, and the instalation instructions. The current drivers and version 3.1 of snapstream fix many of the problems associated with the pvr cards and the mpeg. and version 3.2 currently in beta testing fixes the playback issues with mpeg using too much cpu

http://www.snapstream.com/Products/P...VS3_SysReq.asp

[tjdmobile]

Thanks for the replies. I love this program, I am really mostly having problems once a program reaches the 2 hour mark. Snapstream will play it back fine, it just crashes everything else. I will eventually figure this out. My goal always is to record DVD ready shows. I downloaded the latest drivers from Hauppauge (actually, the entire CD). I wonder if going back to another release of the Hauppauge software would solve any problems? Does this software depend on Hauppauge DLL's and software to interface with the card? However it works, it works really nice!

I don't mean to get down on this program. I purchased it because Snapstream has a successful history, and I am confident that all will be fixed.

Regarding VBR - that would be awesome if that could make it into an upcoming release. For what it's worth, I put a couple of the files to a bitrate tester program. The files produced are not really CBR, as the bitrate jumps around, along with the quality. Interesting to see the difference in files between apps creading them. The files are all marked as CBR though.

Well, I slept on it, and I am going to hang out and see what this awesome program will do. After all, the only limitations I have right now only affect me when I make DVD's. I still watch the majority of my TV through the computer anyhow...

[honer123]

Yeah,

3.2 beta is a nice jump and will be worth the wait.
Honer

[RobertH]

try tmpg enc to do dvd authoring, many of the programs that use direct show to figure out how to deal with the mpeg files snapstream creates use codecs that wont handle files that are already dvd-ready, below is a link to a discussion (that also leads to another discussion) about using it to make dvd's using tmpgenc and its authoring program
http://discuss2.snapstream.com/vb/sh...&threadid=8478


I would suggest (and snapstream does this too) to NOT use the drivers from hauppauge as they arent uptodate and have some good bugs in them, click the link below for the SS requirements page it has a link to the most up-to-date drivers, and instructions on how to install them:

http://www.snapstream.com/Products/P...VS3_SysReq.asp

[tjdmobile]

Thanks for the link. Already had that version installed (got it from SHS before I purchased Snapstream.

Question - what type of stream is SS producing from the PVR-250? Is it program?

Observation: Could be related to the stream, but the bitrate calculations are completely off on my setup. The calculation on the setup page is nowhere close to what is actually used. For example, I set up a template to fit a 2.5 hour movie on a 3hr DVD template. According to the calculation built into SS it should have been approx. 720M per half hour. The movie came out to 4.03 gig. Header on Mpeg reads that it is 3100 kbps. The template shows 3324000 which includes audio. This is fine. The resulting file when viewed in Bitrate viewer from www.tecoltd.com shows conflict with header information. It has a peak of 4.2mbps, average of 2.9mbps with a quant. scale all over the place. I would love to play with the Beta 3.2 to see what difference it makes.


Just noticed something else interesting. When viewing programs recorded with SageTV within SS, they are in super slo-mo. Playing at about .75x speed. Played in Zoomplayer or PowerDVD, they are normal. Shows recorded with SS work as expected though.

Thanks all for your continued help. I have been doing PVR since I got my ATI card a couple years ago, and this is definately the closest thing to perfect so far!

[RobertH]

if you dont use the hardware wizard to setup the pvr card then ss cant build a proper control graph to set the bitrate on the card (your log should indicate something along the lines of couldnt build card specific graph)

I belive it uses the builtin dvd ready (or just sets up the codec with the proper resolution, but if you record in one of the 2 dvd-ready modes the driver shoudl be setup for an mpeg2 program stream that is dvd-ready

in everything upto 3.2 there is a bug in the mpeg decoder they use, if you are a registerd owner you can join the beta group and download the latest version. This fixes all mpeg playback issues as it uses the mpeg decoder of your choice

morethan likely the descrepincy with the mpegs you recorded are due to the card not being sufficiently cooled (causes encoder problems) or that ss is not building a card specifc graph for you

[tjdmobile]

RobertH, Thank you again for your continued help here. I look a look at the log from the last recording, and it "APPEARS" that SS is definately building a graph for my PVR250. It connects to the correct PINS, appears to pass the correct bitrates to the encoder. I am now coming up with the bitrates to use by experimentation, rather than Bitrate calculators. So far, so good on that front. As I said, the bitrates are off when you use a bitrate viewer to bypass what the header says. The header always reports the bitrate that I set up in SS, but the resulting bitrate is different inside the file. I am pretty sure that I used the harware wizard, as all my hardware was pre-installed and working before I installed SS.

I don't know where to go to get on the Beta team. I would if I knew where to go. Yes, I am a registered user (still glad on that one)

Top notch support on this site, thanks!

TJD

[James]

if you wish to enter the beta program and be one of our slaves...er, guinnea pigs...er, testers...


http://betaprogram.snapstream.com

[RobertH]

nice way to put it james

it will depend, if the bit rate viewer program understands the mpeg format and processes it itself or if it uses a directshow codec to open the file. I have noticed on my machines that some of the directshow mpeg decoders I have (ligos in perticular) dont correctly playback / read the headers from the files that the wintv app and snapstream make. They report incorrect resolutions, bad gop structure and incorrect bitrates. But other things like powerdvd and tmpgenc with the MPEG2Vfapi plugin state the correct bitrates and resolutions