Driver Version Tested: 1.5
Type: TV tuner/capture board with hardware MPEG encoder
MPEG Standards: MPEG-2, MPEG-1 with VCD-only profile, SVCD
Bit Rate Control Modes: average-based VBR, CBR
Bit Rates: MPEG-2 at 2-12 Mbit/s, MPEG-1 at 1152 Kbit/s
GOP Formats: IPB-frame
MPEG Audio Modes: Full MPEG-1 layer 2 support
Capture to AVI? Yes
DirectShow Capture Driver? Yes (AVI only)
Frame Sizes: Full D1, half D1, SIF
Scene Change Detection? No
Macrovision Detection? No
Inputs: S-video, composite video
Outputs: None
Video Pass-through: No
Audio Capture On-Board? Yes
Drivers: Win98SE, WinME, WinNT4, Win2K, WinXP
Availability: Everywhere
Price: n/a
NOTE: This review is about the original WinTV PVR. This is an obsolete product. I have no idea how the newer "numbered" PVR models compare.
This board is designed to turn your computer into a Tivo-like box: record video in MPEG to the hard disk, with the ability to pause and fast-forward the playback, schedule programs, etc. The board even comes with a remote control and a small IR reciever you plug into the WinTV card. The PVR has a completely separate "record" mode, so the time-shifting functionality does not interfere with simple MPEG capturing.
If you've ever used a regular WinTV board, you will have an excellent idea of what to expect from this board. Indeed, the PVR is nothing but a regular WinTV board with a Visiontech Kfir MPEG encoder chip on board. Beyond that general observation, see my TV tuner boards article for more information on the non-MPEG parts of this board.
Recording video is pretty simple. The board comes with a slightly-modified version of the familiar WinTV2000 application. You press a little button and down pops a panel with VCR-like controls. While recording, you see the original video on the monitor. Since you can't see the decoded MPEG video and there are no TV outputs, you can't judge what the result will look like until you play the finished file back.
The WinTV2000 application always writes the encoded video to a file of the form _dvcrNNN.mpg. You can't change this naming scheme, only the place where it writes the files. You have to go and rename the file by hand after stopping the record process.
Like all other WinTV boards, you can also capture to AVI, but unfortunately you can't get an MPEG-compressed AVI like you can with the Pinnacle DC1000. You're stuck with software codecs when capturing to AVI.
Hauppauge claims that you need anywhere from a Pentium II-300 to a Pentium II-450 to run this board. I tested it on a Pentium-133 (pre-MMX) with a DMA mode 2 hard drive and worked as well as you can expect on so slow a machine. The CPU usage rose with the capture bit rate; at 12 Mbit/s, the CPU usage hovered around 50%. When I turned off the hard disk's DMA mode (going to PIO mode 4), I got occasional pauses in the video, and CPU usage went up to about 70%. This suggests that DMA is absolutely necessary on so slow a machine, so that high CPU usage doesn't translate to delays in I/O handling.
This board offers 1-parameter VBR, based on average bitrate.
For full-D1 resolution, the software only offers 4-12 Mbit/s in 2 Mbit/s increments. This was done partly to increase usability and partly to deny access to settings that are known to make ugly video. At 4 Mbit/s this board does improve markedly over my 3 Mbit/s test setting, but the rules of this contest demand 3 Mbit/s video, so I had to turn on the program's hidden advanced settings dialog to enable the ability to set custom encoding settings.
This advanced settings dialog offers many settings, many of which are easy to use improperly. Therefore, although Hauppauge has not formally complained about what I am about to divulge, they have informally told me that this feature is unsupported: if you send them a tech support request involving changes within this dialog, they might well tell you to go jump in a lake! I also will not help you to get settings within this dialog right. The bottom line is, if you enable this dialog, you're probably on your own, so only adventurers need apply. Having said all that that, to turn on the advanced settings dialog, simply download this registry patch and run it. Then when you start WinTV2000 the next time, the advanced settings button will appear within the MPEG Capture settings tab within the main settings dialog. May the Force be with you. :)
Frame 0, Frame 1, Frame 2, Frame 3, Bitrate and Quantization Data.
The nearest competitor in terms of quality is the Vitec DCM, which even in its 1.x version was slightly better than the PVR, and now in its 3.0 version it's significantly better.
I did not use my standard MPEG-to-AVI method in making these frame grabs, because DVD2AVI can't deinterlace the PVR's streams as it can for all of the other encoders in this review. Instead, I used GraphEdit, running the video through Ligos' MPEG decoder filter and I-Media's AVI renderer to get an interlaced AVI file. (I also used the Huffyuv codec with the "swap fields on decompression" option, which helps in the next step tremendously.) Finally, I used VirtualDub with version 2.4 of Donald Graft's Smart Deinterlace filter to deinterlace the file. The resulting frame grabs are a bit narrower (704x480 vs 720x480 for the other grabs) and have a bit of a color shift relative to other encoders' images, but at least they're better than what I was getting with my standard method!
This is a good board if you mainly want to do time-shifting, your budget is limited, and you don't have a powerful enough CPU to run the ATI All-in-Wonder. If you're after high-quality video captures, the AIW is a far better product: with both boards the highest quality is obtained by capturing to AVI, then using a separate encoder. The AIW should also produce a somewhat better AVI, since it's a better-specified board, with fewer video problems as a rule than WinTV boards. (See my TV tuners article for more on this subject.) And given a fast enough machine, the AIW will produce far better MPEG output than the PVR. The AIW is also a better overall value, unless you already have a good 3D card.
On the other hand, if you're willing to go beyond 3 Mbit/s for full-D1 video, the PVR might look better to you. Like any half-decent encoder, it can produce good video at 8 Mbit/s without trouble.
This board gets a usability ding because it's hard to capture in S-video mode.
Usability: 8
Functionality: 5
Quality: 0
Core Value: 8
Bundle value: 3
Overall: 5.45
| Updated Mon Sep 22 2008 12:15 MDT | Go back to MPEG Encoder Reviews | Go to my home page |
