HDTV tuner on a Windows PC

[Bob_in_OKC]

Anyone here using an HDTV tuner on a Windows PC? If so, do you use Windows Media Center to watch and record TV? Or if not, what software do you use? I can't get consistent playback with Media Center. Sometimes the audio won't work. Sometimes the video freezes. I find I have to record it in Media Center but watch the recording in Windows Media Player or some other application besides Media Center.

I also have trouble watching live HDTV in Media Center, so maybe there's a video setting I could change for better results. All in all, perhaps not a major problem, but it seems like it would be fixable.

 

[atarione]

so i have a couple hauppauge HVR-1250 tuners that work fine here ...well they have since driver updates sort soon after Vista came out...


however I have been running tv cards for nearly 10 years and in my experience they are the most fiddly pain in butt add-in cards there are.


specs / os ...other details would help other people be able to give you some pointers /tips


you might want to download DPC latency checker to see if you system has some sort of bottlenecks going on.

http://www.thesycon.com/deu/latency_check.shtml


this tool helped me when one of the tuners started stuttering after a system upgrade... eventually tracking down different drivers the motherboard / chipset resolved the issue in my case.

but yeah... personally i find tv tuner cards to be a massive pain in the a** .... If my wife wasn't so fond of the DVR functionality i would have probably got rid of them in a moment of frustration... happily for some time now my HVR-1250's have been managing to not be a hassle here at least.

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

1. What version of windows
2. What Tuner card
3. Do you have a sound card or using on board sound?
4. Latest Drivers?

64-bit Windows 7; TV Wonder 750 USB; onboard Realtek HD sound; downloaded latest drivers, today.

Thanks for the questions. That's all essential information for this discussion.


Atarione's comments remind me - With an Hauppauge PCI card and an Intel chipset, everything has gone smoothly for me with TV tuners. Add an AMD or Via chipset to the mix, or change to ATI or Diamond Multimedia, and who knows what will happen.

Edit - Also I should add it's a AMD A6-3650 APU with Radeon HD graphics onboard and an added ATI PCI Express card for dual-monitor capability and 8GB RAM.

 

[atarione]

Windows 7; TV Wonder 750 USB; onboard Realtek HD sound; downloaded latest drivers, today.

Thanks for the questions. That's all essential information for this discussion.


Atarione's comments remind me - With an Hauppauge PCI card and an Intel chipset, everything has gone smoothly for me with TV tuners. Add an AMD or Via chipset to the mix, or change to ATI or Diamond Multimedia, and who knows what will happen.

oh.....yeah... I am not too fond of the TVwonder tuners ... i had a couple including a 750..which worked for 2 days and then just died for no reason.

what are the rest of your system specs because these tuners are going to be cpu reliant in large part.


You will definitely want to go on over to AMD and get newest drivers from their site if you've not done that .... i'd unstall any current drivers for the tuner and do a clean install of the drivers... you'll want to check for new video / audio drivers while you are at it.

I'd also check the DPC latency thing out also ...

hopefully you can get the TV wonder working seems some do... personally i don't like them things ...wasted too much time on AMD / ATI tuners in the past trying to get the damned things working right..the tuner on my AIW died too now that I think on it....TWICE...(RMA'd the first one and the replacement had the tuner die a year later).

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

oh.....yeah... I am not too fond of the TVwonder tuners ... i had a couple including a 750..which worked for 2 days and then just died for no reason.

what are the rest of your system specs because these tuners are going to be cpu reliant in large part.


You will definitely want to go on over to AMD and get newest drivers from their site if you've not done that .... i'd unstall any current drivers for the tuner and do a clean install of the drivers... you'll want to check for new video / audio drivers while you are at it.

I'd also check the DPC latency thing out also ...

hopefully you can get the TV wonder working seems some do... personally i don't like them things ...wasted too much time on AMD / ATI tuners in the past trying to get the damned things working right..the tuner on my AIW died too now that I think on it....TWICE...(RMA'd the first one and the replacement had the tuner die a year later).

I went back and added some system specs in my previous reply. Based on what you described, I'll uninstall the audio, graphics and TV tuner drivers and let them re-install.

Thank you for the insight.

 

[charles 1973]

I have a ATI All-in-Wonder SDTV Video card, and I can tell you it is indeed a Wonder card...As in I wonder if it will work today! If I'm carefull, Very carefull, I can use many of it's functions, mess up once, and it's back to square one. Everything Freezes, I must restart the computer.

Overal it's OK, but I don't use it much anymore. Hardly the Be-all/End-all of Video I was hoping. It does do some some really cool tricks, but it's sort of like an Ice Skater trying something very difficult to impress the judges, Sometimes it works, But Often they end up on their A#&!

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

What I do with this card mostly is leave it set up to record Austin City Limits automatically. I never know when it's going to come on, but the episodes just appear on my computer. It works nicely for this purpose, as long as I record in Media Center and play it back in Media Player. But if I want to watch live HDTV, it's sporadic.

 

[atarione]

what sort of Hard drive do you have?

when you try to watch live tv do so see / hear a lot of drive thrashing (ton of HD activity light activity.)

so as I mentioned before these sort of tuners are highly cpu dependent as the rely on the CPU for for their functions.

in my case i have my hybrid tuner paired with a i5-2500K @ 4.3Ghz it could easily multitask and still handle live tv at the same time... Those AMD A6 APU things are fine and all..but they do not have the same sort of CPU horsepower something like a i5 or i7 to be sure... or an i3 for that matter.

I think you really need to take a look at the latency checker and see of something else running in background is choking the thing out?

also maybe try to disable you virus scanners live scanning on the tv recording directories ...and for that matter maybe try disabling it temporarily and see what happens with live tv with it disabled.

if you having any other programs running / running in background try turning them off (one at a time) to see if you can narrow the cause down as well.


and go to AMD and get newest drivers for the APU / TV wonder also... and maybe head over to realtek site for newest audio drivers also.... I wouldn't rely on windows update for the drivers if i was y'all.

 

[dew042]

so as I mentioned before these sort of tuners are highly cpu dependent as the rely on the CPU for for their functions.

That A6 is a quad core at 2.6Ghz. I don't think that is a choke point -- I saw a review on a 750 USB tuner with a AMD quad core that averaged 11% CPU usage, 20% peak.

Personally not a fan of USB tuners in general. I have a three tuner platform with a Haupauge 1250 and two HDTV Wonder 650s. With my i5 I can use my PC and record three channels, and watch playback -- no sweat.

.dew.

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

To answer one of atarione's questions, I have a regular spinning SATA drive, 2TB, mostly clean. Media storage is mostly on a separate drive that I transferred from my last computer.

Whatever else I'm doing with the computer has no effect on whether the HDTV works. Processing power and memory aren't a problem, as far as I can tell. I had worse problems with a TV Wonder 650 PCI card in my last computer with a Via chipset from the Pentium 4 era...and a Hauppauge PCI card out of my wife's Compaq was a non-starter in my home-build.

 

[dew042]

I had worse problems with a TV Wonder 650 PCI card in my last computer with a Via chipset from the Pentium 4 era...and a Hauppauge PCI card out of my wife's Compaq was a non-starter in my home-build.

Well a P4 era CPU would have trouble with pretty much any HDTV application. That does not surprise me.

Personally, I use Beyond TV for recording. Its a much better TV only application. You can get a trial and try it out from their website.

.dew.

 

[spaceman]

Another vote here for the Hauppage 1250. :thmbsp: I've been using one for about 2 or 3 years now, & the drivers have gotten WAY better for it, over time. :yes: There's definitely a process to installing the drivers, and you need your original driver CD in the drive while updating newer drivers that you downloaded. The software "verifies" that CD, to see if you really own it, LOL. And when you downloaded the drivers, you should have just downloaded the latest version of Win-TV too, as it works WAY better than Windows Media Center. You can control all kinds of stuff, like what audio it uses, how much HDD space to use as a buffer, & you can tell it to use Hardware Graphics Acceleration (your video card) or not. Surprisingly, it works pretty darn good without your vid card, but you might try it both ways, to be sure, since most of us have unique systems. In other words, if you want to learn how to fine tune your Hauppage, to work VERY well, use Win-TV. No comments on the ATI thing, except I've heard before, that they're problematic. :scratch2:

 

[atarione]

To answer one of atarione's questions, I have a regular spinning SATA drive, 2TB, mostly clean. Media storage is mostly on a separate drive that I transferred from my last computer.

Whatever else I'm doing with the computer has no effect on whether the HDTV works. Processing power and memory aren't a problem, as far as I can tell. I had worse problems with a TV Wonder 650 PCI card in my last computer with a Via chipset from the Pentium 4 era...and a Hauppauge PCI card out of my wife's Compaq was a non-starter in my home-build.

hi fair enough ...what i was saying before is the DPC Latency Checker tool would help see if something (if it is something else you have running , a system process or background application.driver with issues.etc) is causing an issue with live tv on the system.

if you try it and their is high latency it is a bit or a process to figure out what exactly is causing it..but it would be worth while (imho) to run the tool and find out if something or other is causing high dpc latency.

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

hi fair enough ...what i was saying before is the DPC Latency Checker tool would help see if something (if it is something else you have running , a system process or background application.driver with issues.etc) is causing an issue with live tv on the system.

if you try it and their is high latency it is a bit or a process to figure out what exactly is causing it..but it would be worth while (imho) to run the tool and find out if something or other is causing high dpc latency.

I did try the latency checker for a while and didn't see any problem results. I'll try again in a bit. At the moment, I'm going back to the original software that came with the tuner to see if I can get better results with HDTV. So far, it's the same.

Thanks for following up on my thread.

 

[Bozzmonster]

Well a P4 era CPU would have trouble with pretty much any HDTV application. That does not surprise me.

Personally, I use Beyond TV for recording. Its a much better TV only application. You can get a trial and try it out from their website.

.dew.

I found the P4 situation out myself just recently. I just recently jumped into an Amazon Prime membership and attempted to stream HD video. Did nothing but freeze and stutter. This weekend, I upgraded to a HP with an i7 processor and 10 Gb of RAM. Long term, I'm going to throw a second harddrive in the unit, a BluRay drive, and something like the below on the network for OTA and cable reception. Heard many good things about the SiliconDust line of products.

http://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-H...53464824&sr=8-1&keywords=silicon+dust+homerun

 

[spaceman]

You must be wealthy or braver than most folk. $180 for something you "heard" was good? :scratch2: Just my 2 cents here, but I think you'd be much better off with a Hauppage product. That HVR-1250 is the lower priced product in that line, & it only costs around $35. They've been in the TV tuner business for many years, and they have all the bugs worked out of their software, for 64-bit Win 7, so 32-bit should be pretty much perfect too, I'd think. Maybe read up at Consumer Reports, or something similar. :scratch2:

 

[atarione]

i've actually heard pretty good stuff about the HDHomeRun cable card thing myself.

infact I would like to get one and see about replacing a cable box or two with little miniITX htpc's ...of course microsoft's moves with windows media center in windows 8 make me wonder about long term viability

it is awesome they are charing $10 to add more or less exactly the same media center included in windows 7 to windows 8 pro...bahahah

however you can get free media center keys for windows 8 pro right now till end of January.


http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/feature-packs


if you could drop a couple cable box rentals $10ea a month here and just pay for the cableCard rental $2.00 here ...so $18 a month less you could pay for the hdhomerun in about 10 mos..

however the downside is ondemand stuff won't work with the cablecard..

and of course if anything goes wrong (i.e. htpc stops working or cable stops working wife will not be pleased.)... still debating here.

 

[mrreality13]

try this
http://xbmc.org/


XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, XBMC is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 50 software developers have contributed to XBMC, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages.

While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your HTPC. Supporting an almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.

Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.

It is difficult to put into words all that XBMC can do, head to the gallery to see some examples, or take the plunge and Try it Today.

 

[Bob_in_OKC]

I think I might try the HVR-1250, but but I haven't seen it priced at $35.

Edit - Bought a used one on eBay. We shall see...

 

[Bozzmonster]

Good points all around. I am continuing to shop for the best solution. The SiliconDust unit caught my attention as it is hooked to the network rather than limited to one PC. Plus, the link I provided is the highest price unit. If I was interested in basic cable only (which I am) I can find a much more reasonably priced unit.