Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 vs software?

[valnar]

Has anyone compared the hardware MPEG2 encoder on this TV/Tivo-like tuner board with CCE or TMPGEnc?

I want to convert a bunch of tapes to DVD and I usually use the method of capturing with HuffyUV and converting to MPEG2 with an offline software encoder.

I'm curious as to the quality of the WinTV-250 board. Anyone have it?

-Robert

[valnar]

It's been two months. I think a bump is in order. :)

[The_Flash]

Hopefully I'll be able to answer your question at the end of the week. The PVR-250 I ordered should be here in a few days. I have long used CCE to convert my AVIs into DVD format, but recently I have too many projects and too many VHS tapes that need converted that I decided to give this a try. I'm thinking I may capture at the card's max rate (12mbits/sec), build the project, and then use DVD95Copy to shrink the huge vobset down. If time were on my side I wouldn't use this method, but unfortunately it is not...It is 2004 in how many days!?:scared:

[valnar]

Thanks. VHS tapes are what I have in mind too.

-Robert

[The_Flash]

The few captures Ive made seem reasonable in terms of quality. They are very old VHS tapes, some containing footage shot in 70s. It's difficult to compare the quality with CCE because I normally use CCE for reducing retail DVD video sizes. Two totally different sources. When I get to some more "modern" tapes I'll let you know what I think.

Right now I'm having problems keeping the audio in sync when authoring to DVD. :scared:

[The_Flash]

I never really got the a/v sync issues fixed. I returned the Hauppauge card for the Canopus ADVC-100.

[valnar]

I got most of my tapes done now the hard way - pure uncompressed (HuffyUV) and conversion offline. I'll just stick with using the PVR functions of the PVR-250 for my CableTV.

Thanks for your input.

-Robert

[The_Flash]

The Canopus works great, and the video quality is awesome. You're right though, the "hard way" has been a fail safe for me, too.

[bb]

I've been told that the Canopus ADVC-100 is a great convertor, but it can't convert to MPEG-2 (only DV). If you need a fast VHS -> MPEG-2 conversion, you might be interested in the Mainconcept MPEG Encoder. It features an analogue/digital capture module. You can capture the ADVC-100's DV stream and convert to MPEG-2 in realtime.

Of course this works for DV camcorder input, too.

bb