PVR250 and Windows Media

[crawfork]

I have not been able to get SS to record WMV. I can record to MPEG and recompress to WMV. Is this a known issue with the PVR and if so will WMV recording be added in a future point release?

[RobertH]

Yes the PVR cards (and all the other supported hardware encoders) can only record into mpeg format, the hardware encoder on the device only allows for snapstream to pull data from the card in mpeg format.

Snapstream will likely venture into finding some method to do wmv encoding but will not likely happen in the near future.

[Julia]

The Hauppauge PVR cards output a MPEG2 stream, so the only way is to recompress after the fact... (Well, there is another way, but it isn't pretty).

Julia

[crawfork]

Is there a post that has the "not so pretty" way of accomplishing this? I've looked and can't seem to search and find any info.

[RobertH]

it isnt a way that snapstream can do it, it involves manually building a graph and so far the only result is recording to uncompressed avi or something, or seeing a live picture from the card.

snapstream knows its there, but the problem is that it isnt there on all cards and the not so pretty interface seems to change from one driver version to the next. Also encoding in windows media format would negate the funtionality of using a hardware encoder since you would then not be using the hardware chip and would be chewing up the cpu for doing windows media.

[crawfork]

Thanks for all the help.

[Julia]

Not so pretty was a reference to what the developers would need to do to implement it. There is no way for you to do this with snapstream as an end user. The CPU usage would be just like any other non-hardware encoding card. The thing is that the PVR card has hardware encoding just for MPEG. I understand that some cards may support WMV in the future and some already support MPEG4 (DivX).

Julia