Hauppauge PVR 150 output looks like crap

[wmansfield]

I purchased a PVR 150 from Circuit City the other day and got it set up with both the WinTV2000 program they send with it and a freeware PVR program called GBPVR. On both programs the TV output looks like it's saturated with color. Any shade of white is WHITE and makes things difficult to see. Darks are also hard to make out. I've tried adjusting color settings and such with little success. This shows up in the PVR recordings as well. I went ahead and took the card back since I was so disgusted with it, but I wanted to know if there is a TV card out there that won't give me these problems? I realize that standard TV is still an analog medium being converted into digital for the PC, but there has to be something out there better than this particular card. I am wanting to set up an HTPC in addition to the computer I have now, but if this is the kind of TV quality I can expect from it I am not sure I want to mess with it.

 

[Nessism]

Sorry to hear about your experiences since I just bought a 150 today! Planning to replace a Ledtek 2000 Expert software based card. I'm not planning on using TV out on the card though, going to let my video card take care of that.

My hope with the 150 is to improve the video to sound sync mismatch. At any rate I'll report back with my findings regarding the image quality.

Good luck.

Ed

 

[wmansfield]

I had no problems with synchronization, the only problems were the quality of the recordings and the TV output I was getting.

 

[Keysplayr]

Those cards only work well when you live in a town called Hauppauge. 😉

Sorry, just in a stupid mood. 😀

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: wmansfield
I had no problems with synchronization, the only problems were the quality of the recordings and the TV output I was getting.

Mine works fine, but definitely needed some tweaking to get the contrast and brightness of the capture chip set properly for my input. If you use SageTV or BeyondTV, there are settings built into those applications for adjusting the video capture settings (other applications may have them as well; these are the only ones that I know do for sure). For general use, you can download GraphEdit and tweak the encoder settings of the driver through that (insert the 'Hauppauge WinTV Encoder' object into a graph and then open its properties page). I don't know why they make it such a PITA to fix it; they should provide an application or control panel icon to tweak the cards.