AVerTV HD DVR: New PCIe HD Capture Card - Page 2

I have this card for about a week. I see no use with HDMI since it only accept 720P & I saw no third party software working with it so far. You can only take picture & the card also lag. Both PS3 & XBOX 360 can be connected via HDMI actually.

I use a receiver & use component for recording footage. The driver can be used on third party software only with component if you want HD. It work very well with Windows Media Encoder & it's free for genuine Windows users.

I own a Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.2ghz & few nifty overclock left & right. This card handle 60FPS unlike older SD capture that cap at 30fps. Yeah, this card ask a lot of bandwidth.



All I can say is this Card work like it's written on the box.

I have a few questions for you guys that own this card. I'm not really interested in PVR capabilities just a way to get a HD video signal into the PC just for viewing. Like the good 'ole days of using dScaler to watch TV in a window while doing other things like surfing the web.

Can you just view a 1080i signal like you can a 720p? My Sat box can output at 720p also if 1080i will not work.

Have you guys tried using dScaler 4 with this card to see if it works?

If it does not work, maybe JohnAd could add support for it.

Thanks in advance.

I had no problems viewing when my DVR output was set to 720p or 1080i. I'm not sure what Mr. Deap is talking about when he says this card only accepts 720p over HDMI. You should be able to view and record in 1080i. I believe I was recording both 720p and 1080i using HDMI and Component, unless I missed something? I have no problems recording with the AVer software, but I'm on the lookout for a better solution that can give me a hihger bitrate than 15000 for better quality. FRAPS could provide for a better quality capture, but I just don;t think my system is up to snuff. By the way, I misspoke when I said I had an ATI 3300HD IGP. I should have said that my mobo has the HD4200--not that it makes much difference.

Maybe Mr. Deap tried to record a 720p porgram over HDMI that required HDCP. I am also surprised that he was surprised that the encoding caused lag just like all other encoders do.

When I say lag it's like it have delay... The input stay at 59.94 all the time when I record.

The encoder doesn't stutter nor the video doesn't stutter either. Never mind, 1080i actually work in HDMI.

I think if you want to have no lag when recording games, you should get an HDMI splitter and run one directly to the TV for playing while the other HDMI is sent to the AVer card for recording.

Then you can play your game with no lag and record on the PC at the same time.

Well the problem is the driver with HDMI, there's nearly no third party software that support the HDMI except the software that come with it.

The included AVer software works for recording via HDMI/Component just fine...if only those incompetents at AVerMedia would allow for recording above 15000. I'm thinking of returning the card just because of this limitation. I'm finding that getting it to record with 3rd party software is more trouble than it's worth. I tried it again and actually got Power Director 8 to record via Component with 25000 bitrate and no weird lines, and the quality looks pretty nice, but for some reason the program is squeezing the aspect ratio a bit. So, back to square one.

AVer, why go through the trouble of releasing a decent and affordable piece of hardware, only to cripple it by not offering archival quality MPEG-2 encoding? Who was the idiot at AVer who decided the 15000 kb/s limit was sufficient enough for their encoder? I wish someone would hack the software to allow for higher bitrate encodes.

I'm sure there is some 3rd party capturing software out there that would work properly (at least via component in), using the DirectShow filters, but I have yet to find it.

FRAPS stutters no matter what resolution/frame rate I use. I also tried using CamStudio, DScaler, Taksi, VirtualDub, Power Director 8 etc. and none of them would work effectively, if at all.

PowerDirector 8 (trial) works well with absolutely no stuttering, and gives good quality at the highest 25000 MPEG-2 bitrate, but I can't get it to display or record the proper aspect ratio of 16:9. It seems to encode some black bars when 16:9 HDTV should display no bars.

Has anyone with this card got Cyberlink Power Director 8 to capture properly at 25000 with this card? The quality of the encode is good if you can get it to give you the full 16:9 widescreen without those small black side-bars.

Here is the free trial if you want to try:
http://download.cnet.com/CyberLink-P...-10483012.html

The recording bit rate has apparently being set by Aver so as not to exceed the GPU and CPU power avaiable on the minimum system specifications published for use of their product.
If this is the case it would certainly would have been nice of them to test the capabilities of any system on which their product is running and offer the user the abiility to record at a higher bit rate if the system could support it with out problems.

I made here a downloadable version with an exaggerated bitrate.

Video download:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L6RE6300
WMV 10Mbps 2-pass 60fps.
452MB sorry if it's big

It will help you to judge the card.

The software I use is Windows Media Encoder(WMV)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...r/default.mspx

I have no problem so far with it.

You can also use Windows Media Capture 9 series(AVI uncompressed)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...kInfoContainer

Though for using WinCap9 you need at least 3 "FAST" hard drive in Raid to properly capture. You can also lock the framerate to 30 which dual raid will work out.

The best result would be using 1080i with wincap & process after with VirtualDub with bob doubler along with flickering, though you will get a lower resolution if converted to 30fps which will turn your 720 horizontal line to 370.

Well you don't need a good PC to get a decent framerate when you use wincap since it's uncompressed, though you need to Raid hard drive to crank up the bandwidth. My recommendation would be 4 at least.

Youtube example below:

Has anyone else tried this card with a Dish DVR?

I have it hooked up with HDMI from a 722 and get excellent video (1080i), but no audio with the HD channels (or with locals through the 722's ATSC connection). If I switch to an SD channel I get the sound as well as video. I've tried every combination available with the dolby settings on the Dish DVR, but nothing makes any difference. If it's a problem with HDCP, I don't know why I'd get even video (which it will record).

Waiting for reply from Avermedia just to find out if it's a problem with the card, with Dish or something on my system.

I'll give component a try, but I'd rather have the dolby audio.

This won't capture dolby 5.1 only 2 channel stereo. Maybe (since I don't own this card) you have to use the audio rca stereo cables when recording HD content.

It's supposed to capture 5.1. The rca cables don't work with the HDMI input. I can do it with component, but I'd like the 5.1 audio. What reason would there be for Hd capture with HDMI input if it only handled analog audio?

I did get a reply from Avermedia and they indicated it should be able to receive dolby, but tried to blame it on the ATI HDMI drivers (which I don't have installed and shouldn't have anything to do with their capture card anyway). Obviously, I didn't get the right tech. When they designed this card they had to be aware that the main use (other than xbox or ps3) would be with cable and especially satellite receivers and should have tested them.

I also talked to Dish tech support and they didn't have anyone that could figure out why the HD audio isn't going through and suggested an e-mail to an engineer (which is what I asked for to begin with, but may not be their fault anyway). The only other setting in the 722 that I could find is for PCM only, but that didn't work either, so it's not just dolby, but digital audio apparently.

Anyway, looks like I'll just have to use the component input, but I'd really like to know why the HDMI digital audio doesn't work.

I've recently purchased this card myself to record Xbox 360 footage and have also only recorded in stereo rather than 5.1. I've spoken to tech support regarding the low bitrate issue but there doesn't seem to be anything useful they can do to help.

The problem I'm having is when I come to edit the MPEG files I get random red frames thrown in at random intervals. Ideally I'd like to capture in some sort of compressed avi to keep the audio in sync and be allowed to edit it cleanly.

I've tried using FRAPS but even without setting it to lossless the files sizes are about 1Gb per minute. It also doesn't capture smoothly at 60fps but is fine at 30fps. I've tried a few different capture programs and editing programs to try and capture but so far have had no joy. It's a shame because it's a very good, easy to use card but it's let down by it's limiting software.

Ideally I'd like to make use of the h.264 encoding but it won't go up to 720p so is useless for what I need it for.

The machine im using should be more than powerful enough (amd phenom II x4 955 3.2ghz, 4gb pc3-10666 ddr3 ram, 2 raid edition 250gb drives in raid 0 for storage and a wd velociraptor 150gb for primary drive) Unfortunately I've actually had to take 4gb out of my machine (I used to have 8) just to get this card to work.

I'll let you know if support come back with anything more useful than trying the latest beta drivers which I've already installed.

Mr. Deap and Richbk,

When you say even with RAID set-ups you can't do 60 FPS but only 30 FPS smoothly, please specify the resolution you are talking about as well. Right now I'm primarily interested in HDTV capture from off my DVR. Broadcasts are not 1080p60 but either 1080i30 or 720p60.

1080i30 requires only a little bit more bandwidth than 720p60. 720p @ 60 FPS is twice the frame rate, but also a little less than half the resolution, so they should somewhat equal out.

So can either of you capture 720p60 HDTV without any stuttering? How about 1080i30?

I could see why you would want to do game footage or camcorder footage at 1080p60, but I don't need this for off-loading television broadcasts from my DVR.

I guess I'm going to have to learn how to setup a RAID 0 myself. My quad-core does not appear to be the limiting factor, since it doesn't really get much over 50% during capturing/grabbing.

My mobos (Gigabyte/Asus) have the AMD 785 chipset (Radeon 4200HD IGP), and seem to offer built-in RAID capabilities. I would like for some advice as to what are the best drives right now to purchase for a RAID 0 set-up since I am starting afresh.

WD Caviar blacks do not seem overly expensive. Or does Seagate or Samsung have a better option? Will two suffice for recording HDTV, or will I require three? How about those expensive, but very fast, SSD's? Should I get one of those instead? How about a RAID with a couple SSD's?

Can I purchase say...2 WD Caviar blacks (let's say 640GB), run them in RAID 0 configuration, and then if I decide I need more speed, simply buy a third, and add it to the other two later on?

The idea of running 4 drives in my system (1 for the OS + 3 more for RAID) isn't exactly all that appealing to me. Will an SSD give me the same sort of speed as the RAID setup while using just 1 cool-running drive? More expensive for less space, but perhaps less hassle.

When I used the FRAPS trial, it limits the capturing to 30 seconds. The files are usually over 300 MB but less than 400 MB. That equates to under 1 GB per minute.

I downloaded a program called HDTune Pro and tested my speeds on both drives. On one drive I was getting consistently over 50 MB/s write speed, and the other was giving me a little over 60 MB/s. Although I did notice it seemed like it took a very long time to get up to full speed, like 10-15 seconds or so. Does that seem right?

Just doing the math, this sounds like enough speed to write over 3 GB per minute. If FRAPS is using ~1 GB per minute, how is it my drives are not fast enough as it is?

I suspect it is more to do with my less than optimal set-up. I suspect my puter is trying to access the HDD for some other task while grabbing, and so the HDD speed is not being dedicated to the capture.

I notice that when I do a fresh install with a newly formatted drive my PC always seems snappy and very responsive. After several months it seems like it gets clogged up and the HDD spins a lot more and I am left waiting a lot more. By the way, I freed up space on both drives and defragged them both, so that is not the issue (anymore). FRAPS still stutters badly.

I bet FRAPS would work smoother for me if I did a fresh clean install and didn't load a bunch of programs on my puter. In other words a PC dedicated only for HD capture and different than my everyday machine.

I need to purchase another drive so I can perform a back-up of my files and then do a fresh clean install. My PC seems sluggish. I do not know how to optimize my system so the HDD isnot always spinning or being accessed.

It doesn't help that I only have 2GB of RAM right now, and 256 MB of that is set-aside for the onboard graphics, leaving me only 1.75 GB.

I am running XP SP3.

I've only tried capturing at 720p60 as my tv doesn't handle 1080i very well and I have a hdmi splitter to allow me to capture on the pc whilst watching on th TV. I found that the screen was juddering and had tears when recording live.

In terms of my raid 0 setup I have two of these: Western Digital WD2502ABYS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Raid Edition 3Western Digital WD2502ABYS 250GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache - OEM Raid Edition 3

Giving me a total of 500Gb. You can use more than 2 drives but you can't just add one in as far as I'm aware. I believe if you wanted to add another you'd have to format the drives you already have and rebuild the raid setup to include the 3 drives. It's all fairly simple and is done through the bios or raid firmware. It was all in my motherboard manual and is fairly intuitive.

What's your complete system specs?

I went ahead and installed the ATI HDMI driver and it did solve the 5.1 audio problem, so now the HDMI input is working perfectly with 1080i and accepting dolby. Apparently the problem isn't just Dish related, but an ATI conflict.

This was a strange solution. I'm still not covinced that the video card has anything to do with it, especially if the HDMI drivers aren't installed. I'm more inclined to believe that it's the ATI SB710 chipset on the mobo.

My system is quite modest, and designed for low power, since I am not a gamer. I mostly just poke around the Internet, and occasionally I need to do some video editing/re-encoding, hence I bought an inexpensive AMD Phenom II quad-core, the 925, which is rated for only 95W and clocks in at 2.8. I have no issues overclocking it to 3.4 though using the stock heatsink, if I feel I need extra speed for certain tasks.

I have a Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H mobo with ATI Radeon™ HD 4200 IGP.

I had 4 GB of basic Crucial DDR2 6400 (800 Mhz) RAM but I built a system for someone in need and robbed 2 GB out of it to put in the other system.

So that leaves me with 2 GB, but the IGP borrows 256 MB so I am left with only 1.75 GB. But I am only running XP SP3, so I can get by for now, until I get some more RAM. I have a copy of Win7 that I bought, but I am giving that to the other person for the new build, so I will have to look for another deal to get myself a copy of Win7.

As for HDD's, I used to have three in this puter but I once again robbed the 500 GB 7200 RPM one out to use for another build for a different person.

So all I have now is:

1) 1TB SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"
2) Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"

Aside from that I have an LG HD-DVD/BD-ROM + DVD-RW burner. Oh, and an Antec Earth 430W 80+ efficiency PWS

I also have an AVer Hybrid Volar Max USB stick tuner for recording ATSC/QAM content.

AVer Media Center works for both devices, I just have to use a pulldown menu to switch the input devices.

I also have an ASUS M4A785-M mobo in a box and a case to go with it that I bought recently for my next build, which I plan on it being an HTPC dedicated to capturing and playback.

I also have an AMD dual-core in the kitchen with another Gigabyte board (this has an HD3200 IGP in it) that feeds HDMI out through the kitchen wall to my Pioneer 500M plasma monitor.

All these boards have HDMI video out.

I also have an ATI Radeon HD 3450 video card or something like that lying around not being used. I think it has 256 MB, and can be used in a "hybrid crossfire" situation, coupled with the IGP, but I never bothered. One might need Vista or Win7 to do that anyway, and I'm running 32-bit XP Home Premium.

You definitely need a 64bit OS and 4gb ram for it to run smooth.

The capture card is overall pretty good, but I have some issues with it.

- Using Aver MC with Win 7 the component signal looks too dark. On XP it's fine, but the problem is that on XP i can't use Fraps, cause the framerate drops and it doesn't record sound. On Win 7 Fraps record sound but it doesn't sync with the video and i have to edit this later. So for me it's either
Win 7 - HDMI + Fraps
or
Win XP - Component and Aver MC capture.
Can someone confirm how it works with Vista?

- Sometimes Aver MC stops recording and says something like "Recording stopped because the input signal resolution has been chanegd". The only thing i found to fix this is to reinstall driver, which is not very cool.

Here's my test video:

Alright. I'll look into finding a deal for a 64 bit Win7. I have 3 WD Caviar Blue 500GB on order from Frys ($44 + tax each). They were out so they gave me a raincheck, so I don't have to purchase them if another deal comes along which is better. It's so confusing about which is best for RAID 0. Some say the Caviar Blacks are no good for RAID because of some FW issue or TLER or something like that. Some say the Samsung F3's or Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 are better bets. But a lot of complaints about drives failing with the Seagates. Then I read about "short-stroking", meaning only partitioning 10-20% of the drive so only the outer edges of the platter are used, giving shorter access times and better sequential write speeds.

Since FRAPS is writing very large files I would guess that sequential write speeds are more important than access times?

I'm new to all this striping of HDD's and such. I am used to just buying a drive, formatting it, and away I go.

If someone thinks three 500GB Caviar Blues are no good for RAID 0, speak now or forever hold your peace.

Sorry I can't help with AMD stuff. I'd get the WD 640GB black drives, blue 640s shouldn't be too bad, don't remember benchmarks right now though. 640s should be faster, better platter sizes. 1TB blacks are slightly faster than the 640GB blacks, but not much.

In Sept/Oct I did a LOT of testing doing sequential writes at work with a Gigabyte board and a i7 920, I was handicapped with Win7 32bit because the software I was testing would only run on 32bit. I had a crappy older Seagate for my OS drive, about 70MB/s thoroughput max. I was using scratch space processing with small partitions (50GB) off each WD disk in RAID0 to make it faster, the arm doesn't have to move as much this way. Using the onboard ICHR10 I saw roughly 100MB/s throughput for one drive, 200MB/s for 2 drives, 300MBp/s for three drives, and 400MB/s using 4 drives (about 438MB/s max). With four drives all processing at once the i7 920 will get a little workout, but still handle it easily, drives will still be the bottleneck. The other non-ICH10R ports are slow, as was the cheap 2 port PCI-e SATA card I tried. I cranked out a 7+ hour job from our old server in 2.5 hours, not too shabby. I tried many combos of drives for writing data and sorting data to the scratch space.

SSDs are faster, good ones will likely hit the 400MB/s throughput with 2 drives, but they are pricey, look in the OCZ SSD forums for more information.

There I made my contribution!! I need a capture card/device.

Sorry, double post.

This is a bunch of screenshots showing the differences in two disk RAID0 using 50GB partitions. The first is using two WD black 640GB, the second is 2 black 1TB drives, and there is also a pic of 4 (mixed 640s and 1TBs) in RAID0, all with 50GB partitions. Some others showing CPUinfo and task manager which is similar to the Atto benchmarks for two drives.

http://s861.photobucket.com/albums/a...20performance/

This may be a heavy request coming from a brand new member but I will ask anyways since I have been following this thread for quite sometime.

Would it be possible to have one of you guys capture a little halo 3 gameplay so I can check the quality? This is basically the only game I am concerned about capturing and I want to compare the quality to what the Hauppauge 1212 is putting out. Also if you want to sprinkle in your 2 pennies between the two that would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Ok guy's I got this card the other day and recorded alot of xbox 360 footage using fraps but I'm also having some stutter and slowdown in the video playback. I have a intel 2 quad cpu with 2gb of ram running vista 32bit. I'm recording to a seagate 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s drive.

Would upgrading to 4 gb of ram solve my problem or could it be something else? I will keep testing this card when i get a chance. Thanks for any help.

I suspect just from doing the math that the HDD simply cannot write those huge amounts of data fast enough. My CPU is definitely not maxed out during recording. Everyone says that it's best to have FRAPS capture to a separate hardrive, which makes sense. But that still will not be fast enough for full 720p60/1080i30 or 1080p60. My goal is to get HD video off the DVR via HDMI (after it has been nicely scaled/deinterlaced by the ABT-2010 processing in my Denon AVR) onto my PC with maximum quality (no recompression). FRAPS is the ticket, and you need to be able to write huge amounts of uncompressed RGB video data to your HDDs.

I think if we want HD stutter free recordings using FRAPS both of us will have to stripe multiple HDD's in RAID 0 configuration. I read some forums and saw some benchmarks that showed the Caviar blues are not really any slower than the blacks, except perhaps a bit on access time. I think like Mr. Deap said, we will need at least 3 drives in RAID 0 for a decent framerate recording of 1080i or 720p60. 3 Caviar Blue 500GB (they make single platter ones) from Frys for $132 + tax is something I'm willing to try. I can always add a fourth later, and reformat them.

Mr. Deap, would you be so kind as to tell us what RAID 0 setup you are using in your system? Are you using a dedicated RAID card or just onboard? Which brand HDD's and how many are you using, and what kind of benchmarks do you get from your drives? Can you successfully record 1080i/p content without stutter, and at what framerate?

I have a feeling that I will be ok as it seems like the main problem with this card is getting the proper uncompressed video. I have a full copy of fraps and my second WD velociraptor drive running @ 10,000 rpm is coming soon. On another forum I heard 2 drives in raid 0 @ 7200 rpm should be enough. It would still be much appreciated if someone posted a halo 3 example though as I cant find one on youtube

I've spoken with their tech support a few times regarding the 4gb ram limit. They've released a new driver that allows me to use the full 8gb of ram I have now so I'm please that's been fixed.

I've been asking a few times as to whether they will include the ability to record in different video formats such as avi (at 720p/1080i) but I haven't heard back from them.

MPEG2 isn't terrible but it's below HD quality at the max bitrate they offer and when I come to editing it I get random red frames which are a nightmare to keep cutting out. I believe converting the video first then editing it would fix this but that's very time consuming.

I'm going to upgrade my system to 4gb's of ram and windows 7 and see how that works out. I'll let you guys know. 2gbs and vista is not cutting it at the moment.