Video Capture Card

[Danja]

First, if you frequent AVSforums, sorry for crossposting from there; my thread is dropping and I'm leaving for grad school soon-ish and am therefore in a bit of a "need answer fast" situation. Here goes:

Hello all,

I'd like to preface my post by saying that what I currently have works; I'd simply like to have it work better. I built my parents an HTPC and am currently fielding a complaint about quality. Before launching into the issue, I'll outline the setup:

General Components:
AMD Athlon X2 250 (3 GHz)
Radeon HD 4250 (onboard graphics)
4 GB G-skill RAM (limited to 3.99 GB via BIOS for capture card compatibility)
GIGABYTE GA-880GMA-UD2H motherboard
Expansion slots: 1 PCI-e 2.0 x16, 1 PCI-e 2.0 x4, 1 PCI-e x1 (occupied by capture card), 1 PCI (occupied by capture card)
Windows 7 x64 Home Premium

TV services:
Comcast Digital HD (Pace RNG110 set top box)
DirecTV Satellite (for foreign channels not available on Comcast) (DirecTV set top box)

Capture Devices and IR:

Hauppauge Colossus PVR - connected to RNG110 via component video, broadcasts via integrated IR blaster
Hauppauge PVR 150 - connected to DirecTV box using composite video, broadcasts via USB IR receiver/blaster (requires < 4GB RAM to function - driver issue).

Right now both cards are working happily side by side in Windows Media Center. The PVR150 and its USB IR hardware were pulled from a dying Windows XP Media Center desktop. Both capture cards are detected by Windows Media Center and (importantly) IR commands to the Pace STB are routed via the Colossus' integrated IR blaster, while IR commands to the DirecTV STB are routed via the USB IR blaster.

The problem is that there's a slight degradation of image quality on the PVR150. The DirecTV channels we receive are not in HD so that's not the issue. The video shown in WMC is just a bit darker and fuzzier than what we see being directly output to the TV via coax cable (that goes through the box). The recording quality in WMC is set to Best, and the Colossus records perfectly crisp HD video so that's not the issue. I read that the PVR150 wasn't known for producing quality output, so I'm assuming it's the card at fault.

So, my questions are as follows:
Is there a possibility that it's not the card at fault? If so, how can I troubleshoot further?
If not, what card can I buy to replace it? I don't need it to be a TV tuner since nothing comes directly without going through an STB; however, it needs to be recognized by WMC as an input device and it needs to be compatible with the USB IR receiver/blaster as the PVR150 was before it.
On a slightly unrelated note, when watching HD video through the Colossus, the WMC channel listings become quite sluggish and unresponsive even though the card is supposed to have its own onboard processor. Would upgrading the graphics card to, say a 6450, help this issue or is it more likely the CPU?
On a completely unrelated note, the HTPC is connected to my dad's office desktop via Homegroup. Everything works except video streaming is choppy. Low resolution videos (720x480 at 8424 kbps) play fine, but higher resolutions (1920x1080 at 36200 kbps) are laggy. Our router is a Linksys WRT120N. Desktop PC is connected via ethernet; HTPC has 3 bars of reception. I moved the HTPC receiver to where it received 4 bars and the streaming quality did not improve. Is this something that can be fixed by upgrading to an Asus RT-N56u and corresponding dual band receiver, or is the bitrate just too high to be played over wireless?

Thanks for any help. I'm very excited that Hauppauge released a WMC compatibility patch for the Colossus and I was finally able to integrate everything into a single package. Now I just want to make it perfect. if there are any other (cost effective) improvements I can make to my setup, please let me know.

 

[valve1138]

PVR150's are kinda known as having crappy video quality. So it can definitely be the card.

 

[Danja]

PVR150's are kinda known as having crappy video quality. So it can definitely be the card.

I suspected as much. I found the Hauppauge_tweaker utility online and maximized the encoder bitrate; it looks slightly better but still not as good as a direct pass into the TV. Looks like I'm searching for a capture card. Any recommendations?

 

[valve1138]

Check out the Hauppauge HVR-1250

It's a PCI-E x1 card, and not too expensive.

 

[Danja]

Check out the Hauppauge HVR-1250

It's a PCI-E x1 card, and not too expensive.

Thanks for the suggestion. It looks good; just one question: Here is a link to the card that I'm looking at:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hauppauge-W...-TV-Tuner-PCIe-x1-/120838597202#ht_500wt_1180

I see two input ports; white and red. The PVR 150 has yellow, white, and red, as does the DirecTV box which it's connected to. I'm really unfamiliar with component/composite video and cables. Can you tell me what the yellow one does and why the 1250 doesn't have it?

 

[valve1138]

Yellow is Composite Video. Red is right audio, White is left audio.

On the 1250 that black port is an S-Video port. Your DirecTV box might have one, and it'll be a bit better than composite video. The 1250 comes with an adaptor that lets you plug composite video into the s-video port, it's that white nub in the accessory pic on Newegg.

Also, the one you're looking at on Ebay is a low profile card. That means the bracket that attaches to your case is half as high as normal. I'm betting you don't have a low-profile case?

 

[Danja]

Thanks for the heads up! No, I'm using the nmediaPC 5000B, which seems to support normal high PCI brackets. Thanks again for saving me some trouble.
Thanks a lot for your help.

Edit: Would it be better to buy a card with a built-in hardware encoder, or will my Regor CPU handle it?

Edit 2: Never mind about my s-video question; I just bought a cable and after reconfiguring WMC it worked just fine (though it did not improve video quality).