Talk:Hauppauge PVR-500

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I have the Samsung tuners, and I was interested in this statement: "Ivtv developers have noted that the Samsung tuners used in later PVR 500s are rather sensitive and will show a grainy picture if supplied with too high a signal level. In this case you must reduce signal strength by either inserting a 'pad' (a resistor) between the PVR and the cable, or if your house has a cable amplifier, by reducing the gain on the amplifier." Can anyone who has tried this give more specific information? How many ohms/watts should the resistor be?

EOL

Can somebody confirm the pvr-500 going EOL and if so, does anybody have a good alternative (PCI, Dual analog tuner and HW MPEG2 enc)?

User Experience Section

I think there is some really useful stuff in that section, but it's a bit messy. Has anyone got any suggestions for tidying it up?

  • I've got one. I'm moving all of it to the Discussion page where discussions about a product actually belong. See below. -- Dagmar d'Surreal 22:28, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

User Experiences

If you have this card, speak up! This is a good place to note your experiences - ease of install, what you like, what's not to like, etc.

I have not actually got this card working on my myth box (it arrives tomorrow), but this link indicates it can be done.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/~ralpha6/knoppmyth/knoppmythtv.htm


  • JB notes: I've had this card up and running for almost 2 months now. It works well, but I feel the quality on the pvr250 was better (input welcome here...)

A fairly recent knoppmyth and an ivtv update were all I needed to get it working. I'm using the built-in tuner as one input, and s-video as the second. I'm not thrilled with the channel mappings yet (but too lazy to fix them...)

  • Kris Rose: I am running the PVR-500 for several weeks now. I also found that it is slightly lower quality (more "grainy" and with scratchy sound on the S-Video) than my previous PVR-350 was but making sure the coax cable was grounded improved the quality somewhat.
  • KK notes: I have this card in a backend system on knoppmyth30.1 and works flawless and the quality is that of analog cable it works flawless (MSI845U motherboard 512ram)
  • JL notes: I am using Knoppmyth 5A30 and I haven't gotten it to work. The pvr-250 I have in my machine works, but not the 500.
  • GA notes: If you have the newer version of the card with the Samsung tuners, you'll need at the very least ivtv 0.4.2, and patch tuner.c to version 3150 to fix the tuning.

http://ivtvdriver.org/viewcvs/ivtv/branches/0.4/driver/tuner.c?rev=3150&r1=3120&r2=3150

  • FLOW notes: I have this running myth .19 under PLUTO .38 - works ok , a bit grainy as mentioned above and I cannot get PIP to work!

Colours looking OK first time I select LiveTV. Exit to main menu and re-enter LiveTV and the colours are faded/washed out (everything looks blueish). Reboot fixes problem. I upgraded to .20 and have not seen this problem again! Everything "just-works" and is smooth (even OSD) on a VIA EPIA SP8000 (800Mhz C3).

  • JS notes: I have been running this card for six months now in a gentoo based myth system. The results have been very mixed along the way. This card is wonderful, when everything is workign together properly, but it is also very tempermental. With earlier versions of ivtv I found I was unable to use video0. Despite the annoyance of getting it workign properly, I highly recomend this card for myth setups.
  • JJ notes: I had issues with my PVR-500 that is running alongside a PVR-250 using IVTV version 0.4.3. The first tuner on the card had no audio. No combination of ivtvctl -d /dev/videoX -q X would provide audio. Upon examining the boot logs, I discovered when the audio wasn't working when that particular tuner was being initialized the log reported:

cx25840 2-0044: unable to open firmware v4l-cx25840.fw

but when the audio is working it reports:

cx25840 2-0044: loaded v4l-cx25840.fw firmware (14264 bytes)

It seems to be some sort of timing issue (the hotplug driver isn't loading the firmware fast enough?), it always happens on the first tuner of the card. The second tuner always loads the firmware correctly. The "power off for 30 seconds" recommendation from the IVTV site seems to fix the problem (at least for that boot) but I sure would like a more robust solution.

  • LL Notes: 1 PVR-500, Slackware 10.2, MythTV .19, ivtv .0.4.3 This card is working well, fortunately I have not run into any technical issues. Picture Quality is a little lack luster.
  • TiTaN_pi8 Notes: I have a MythTV box running Debian, MythTV 0.19 CVS with IVTV 0.6.3. Everything works well, even teletext (closed captioning), unfortunately, like many others, the picture quality is not that great (colors/saturation bad and some scan lines) but enough to watch it from a distance (like you should! ;).
  • CM Notes: I have a PVR500, Mythtv 0.20. This card is working great. I have a remote that came with the card which I can't get to work. It has a usb receiver with. I have LIRC .8 on it.
  • KCarmich Notes: I have a new PVR500 that uses the Samsung Tuner, this did cause problems for me until I updated the kernel to 2.6.18. The video quality was horrible with most channels with so much static that it was not watchable. If you are going to use this card you should have the tuner.c patch or be running 2.6.18 or later, with ivtv 0.8+, the video quality is not as good as the PVR150 in the same box, I would recommend that you use 2 PVR150's if you can handle using the additional PCI slot.
  • Briand Notes: I have a PVR-350 and a PVR-500 (with Phillips tuners), and have had both cards running in harmony since 0.19 in my Asus Pundit-R using ivtv 0.4.0 (tagged release). I recently rebuilt a new mythtv box, using an Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard and using the AGP slot on it for my NVidia FX5200, under MythTV 0.20 SVN using ivtv 0.8.0 (FC5 2.6.18). The machine originally would not boot past POST with the BIOS as shipped when either/both Hauppauge cards were installed. Upgraded the BIOS to latest revision, and have had no problems since.
  • Calvin Dodge Notes: I have a PVR-500 which was getting really bad signal quality on some channels (on other channels this would occur only when the show credits were being displayed). For other reasons I happened to change the default horizontal capture resolution from 480 to 720, and the signal quality problem disappeared.
  • rubicante notes: I got a PVR-500 in November with Samsung tuners and it sucks. The higher channels were snowy and the lower channels I could barely make out. The pvr500_samsung_patch_2.6.17.diff patch helped but did not fix the problem; It just made all channels consistently snowy. Even after re-installing the card on a seperate Windows box with SageTV I still get snowy channels. Thread below has more info. (12/13/06)

http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showthread.php?t=33675

  • Michel notes: On my Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 system I used the IVTV drivers version 0.8.2, which were shipped with this distribution. My card has samsung tuners, and the combination of these 0.8.2 drivers in combination with the 2.6.18.7 kernel was just... plug-and-play :-)

However, sometimes my system became unstable, so I grabbed the 0.10.1 drivers from the 'sid' distribution.

Signal quality is same to the PVR150 that was previously in my system; Please note I reworked the entire cabling system in my house using a steel splitter, which is definitely the reason why this setup provides such good quality video signal. If someone is interested in how to rewire the cabling system, let me know. Maybe I should write a wiki page about that subject?

  • AntiNorm notes: Works flawlessly under MythDora 3.2, and was easy to install.
  • Treacle notes: I had a nightmare getting my card to work. First tried with Mythbuntu 8.10 (tuning locked channels but they appeared as static with some sound), so tried Mythdora and Knoppmyth too, all with the same problem. Then I swapped the card into a different machine, tried all three distros, and that made the machine lock up completely! So I put the card back in the original chassis (an MSI Mega 865) and re-installed, and did some digging around IVTV. From dmesg I determined that my tuner was a Type A (Philips FQ1216AME MK4), which jogged my memory that the card was pretty old. So I tried swapping the fairly new firmware that comes with Mythbuntu 8.10 with older firmware versions, starting with 2006 releases, finally getting to 2000217 version which at 2am this morning appeared to be working fine. Will check it out fully tonight.
  • Bert Busstra notes: I replaced two pvr-250's with two 500's. I purchased these cards on an dutch auction site for 70 euro each. (lucky me) After swapping the cards problems began. At the end of the story I concluded that I had to say goodbye to my Asus AV7880 mainboard. Read the whole story here.

Hint: Don't forget to point a coolingfan to this kind of tunercards. The're heating up rather quickly.