Serious Bugs in Hauppauge HD PVR

This Hauppauge HD PVR has several serious Bugs in it.

1) Generates audio/video files which cannot be read by Windows Movie Maker 2 video editor which is free with Windows which is in 95% of the PC out there. Thus, these video files cannot be Convert-ed to a lower bit rate after the first few views for the purpose of sharing and long term storage, and cannot be clipped to extract the specific 1 minute segment in a 2 hour video. The recorded output of this product is useless.
This failure kills the product.

2) Immediately that this program is invoked, it interferes with (Mutes) other audio running on the desktop, such as CD-IN used by other TV Tuners such as Dvico.

3) There is no way to control the Audio Volume output by this product, independently of other Wave inputs to the PC audio mixer.

4) Hauppauge drivers Crash when scaledown of video resolution is requested in its configuration menu.

5) IR Blaster flashes, but Fails to control 3250HD set top box when Sci Atl 3250 selected in its Blastcfg.

6) No way to control Closed Captions/Subtitles wih this product.


Another sloppy Hauppauge failed engineering release.
It is unfortunate that Hauppauge was the company which had the idea to take on this problem.
Hopefully, more competent Tuner companies will implement this functionality competently.

Most of the muck on forums like this is generated by public relations, advertising, sales personnel who Work for the companies being discussed.
Undoubtedly, most responses here come from people Working here.
Thus, reading previous threads can often be a waste of time sifting through messages saying how great a Worker says the product is.

1) This is a good example: being able to Convert the bit rate on this product is crucial, because the quality of picture it shows you Live, is directly based on the bit rate it is Saving to the disk drive.If you want to watch high quality video live, you will be saving around 10-12 GBytes per hour of storing.
Thus it is necessary after initial viewing to be able to Convert to a lower bit rate for long term storage and sharing.
No true customer would deny the importance of this feature.

2) No product on the desktop should interefere with the operation of any other existing product on the desktop. That is a rule of the road on any general purpose PC. Any failure here indicates incompetence in the developers who created the product.

3) Controlling the Audio Volume is an essential need of everyone who listened to audio. If you play mp3 audio songs, or a radio station, or another TV input, during watching this Hauppauge product, there is no way to balance the audio level of the 2 audio sources, as one would do with a TV and Stereo in one's living room.

4) In fact, the Hauppauge product Crashes under many conditions and I have it crashed on my desktop right now and have little idea what caused it this time.
I should also add that this Crash is a Device Driver crash requiring a reboot of the whole Windows XP PC, to clear the problem, unlike other products which have drivers which will clear after about a minute, when they crash.

5) Failure to control the channel on the Set Top Box is important to many true customers.

6) Closed Captions is the biggest Value-Added in the PC TV experience. Being able to look at Closed Captions/Subtitles when one needs to, keeping the text off the TV window, by selecting the CC window and then scrolling back, sometimes an hour earlier to read the words or song lyrics one missed.

At 12 GBytes per hour, and 36 GBytes per 3-hour Giants NFL game, that means you would need 14 * 36 = 504 GBytes to store the regular season.
Heck, what would you do if they go into the playoffs and win the Superbowl ?

Normally, Real Users, after the first few viewings of the games, will use a Video Editor to Convert the bit rate down from 15 Mbits per second 1920x1080, to maybe 780 Kbits per second at 640x480 or 720x480.
That means that the output file format of the Hauppauge must be Read-able by video editors like Windows Movie Maker 2, which comes free with Windows XP.

Hauppauge's file output is not compatible with any Convert-er that I know of.
And that means the customer is stuck with muck.

If you read my other recent thread here, you will see that I stated that the Infrared Blaster control of Set Top Boxes is unreliable.
And I wrote that before I gambled my hard earned cash money to buy yet another lousy, incomptent, sloppy engineering output from Hauppauge.
I have proposed that Microsoft and its band of Korean, and Chinese and Long Island, TV Tuner card manufacturers write and agree to a specification for USB control of the Set Top Box and submit it to at least the 2 main Set Top Box manufacturers.
In fact, there is a lot more to control inside the Set Top Box than just the single output channel.
These companies need to start work on a USB-STB protocol specification immediately.

What does that mean ? Some public relations, advertising and sales notation signaling ?

I tried the media converter (convertor, they call it) which comes with this Hauppauge package and it fails to generate any file output which can be used with Windows Movie Maker 2 or any other video editor which I downloaded from sites like download.com and tried with it.
If you know of a specific Free video editor which works with the Hauppauge output, I would try it.

I could not care less about H.264. I know it is being pushed in the video industry, but many of these newer codecs have various licensing problems in which some of those who support it want royalties for its use.
Suffice it to say, it is unlikely to be supported by Freeware.
All I need is simple MPEG-1 output, which I know Freeware like Windows Movie Maker 2 can Read, Clip, and Write to a different lower storage demand format.

I tried BeyondTV and its competitors a couple of years ago, and I did not find them doing anything better than the software which comes with Tuner cards like Dvico's. And the Dvico software did many things which BeyondTV etc could not do -- of course that is to be expected since it is Dvico's card.
Even the Scheduling functionality, which these products seem to boast, I thought that Dvico with their base of software and Titan's web site access were equivalent or better for anything functionality that matters.
Most importantly, BeyondTV did not do Closed Captions any better than Dvico's software.

Yes I have tried Vista Ultimate, and finally they have started their attempts to solve the Audio Volume Control balancing issues I have addressed for years.
However, I found that there were Bugs in their implementation, especially in the area of the hardware Composite audio input from the Set Top Box (that is, the 1 pin video, 2 pin audio pinout). That is how TV Tuner users are receiving data directly from the Set Top Box for the digital channels which the NTSC tuner cannot tune (my cable system, approximately channels 2-70 are NTSC, everything else is encrypted ATSC/QAM, accessible decrypted only through the STB Composite outputs or an OCUR CableCard) .
There were serious problems receiving and Recording the audio from that STB input in Vista Ultimate about 6 months ago, so I abandoned it and went back to Window XP SP2, now SP3).

In addition, Microsoft Vista developers failed to propagate the Ctrl-S ability within the SNDVOL32.EXE applet to reduce its size, and with the dynamic increases in width of that applet on the desktop, Ctrl-S within the new SNDVOL.EXE is more important than ever.

Most people simply do not know about Closed Captions and the ability to display them in a separate window without obscuring the picture.
ATI (alone) accomplished this functionality (though theirs could not be copy/pasted, I forget whether there was a Find ability) but failed to market it and no one knew of its existence of the ability it would provide to read lyrics of songs, or read dialogue in a show which might have been delivered inaudibly by the actor but which was known to the Closed Captions transcriber from the pre-show script.

To those Real People seeking information here: as soon as you see the term "troll" or terms like "ranting", you should immediately assume the person using those terms is Working here, public relations firm, advertising/sales force, for the product in question.
The term "troll" describes "uncontrolled speech" "someone speaking out of turn", and anyone doing that is dangerous to the corporations who pay public relations firms to protect their reputations.
Public relations firms are primarily interested in controlling speech and limiting negative speech. They generally have little interest of their own in the numerous products they represent across the internet on a minute to minute basis.

I tried renaming the file and while it does load, it cannot be Written to a file. It actually Crashes Windows Movie Maker 2. Reinvoking WMM2 and trying again results in the same crash ever time.
But before the Write, if you try to Play the Storyboard, after you have moved a section of the video down there, you can hear that there is No Audio.
That is why when I talk about compatibility with WMM2, I usually talk about 3 phases, Read, Clip, Write.
All output files from all TV or AV equipment must be verified to work with WMM2 to be legit. That is the free video editor everyone has, and WMM2's Clip capability is superior to anything else that I have seen on the market.

MPEG-1 is good enough for most utility in the TV Tuner marketplace. And there are no ball and chains of royalties around the neck of MPEG-1, hampering its availability.
Sounds like you have presented another problem with H.264, which is that many implementations are not compatible with each other.
Until all these availability and compatibility issues are ironed out, customers should deny H.264 their money.
Streaming is the main area where H.264 is important, and few customers are involved in generating AV streams across the Internet.

You got the point exactly. There is no other choice. The two most incompetent companies in TV Tuner land have gobbled up the two main sources to HD video, with lousy product.
ATI took the Cablelabs OCUR route, and Hauppauge took the HD (5-pin)STB Composite output route.

Other companies in the business need to understand that these 2 product lines are failing, not because the Customer Demand is not there, but because of the incompetence of those 2 companies.
Other companies need to get in and compete in these 2 areas.

In particular, the 5 pin Set Top Box Composite area is trivial. There are chips in practically every digital TV to receive and digitize the data from those 5 pins.
All Hauppauge had to do was gut one of their existing Windows Device Drivers and replace the driver contents with simple code to feed that digitized data into the Windows BDA filter. That was simple and they have done that mostly, on the display side. However, Hauppauge has fallen flat on their face with Crash Bugs and failure to generate a File rendering which is compatible with any video editors out there, especially the behemoth and the one I consider by far the best-featured, Windows Movie Maker 2, which 95% of PC's already have, Free with Windows.
It is in the interests of anyone generating AV file output to ensure it is compatible with input to WMM2.

Again, this sounds like Sales.
Are you saying that you know for certain that Beyond or Sage solves my issues, with practical experience of your own, or are you just advertising the product ?
I remember someone saying something like that about 3 years ago, and the products were crap. What specifically are you claiming has changed ?

You do not seem to get the picture:
thereare people at these TV Tuner companies who have access to their own technical schematics and design specification of these cards,
who are being Paid to solve these problems.

That is their job. Customers' money is entering the pockets of managers, designers, engineers and even their marketing personnel, for crap output.
The only reason other customers are not demanding the same solutions I have requested is they do not know they exist or can very easily exist.

What about the following statement:
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"All output files from all TV or AV equipment must be verified to work with WMM2 to be legit. That is the free video editor everyone has, and WMM2's Clip capability is superior to anything else that I have seen on the market."
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do you disagree with ?