Difference between revisions of "Hauppauge PVR-150"

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(Issues and Problems: additional information for the DMA issues & potential PCI latency resolution)
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== Issues and Problems ==
 
== Issues and Problems ==
 
* There is a [http://ivtvdriver.org/trac/ticket/48 buggy DMA engine] in (at least some revisions of) this card. According to the bug report on the IVTV page, this affects the '''cx23415/6''' chipsets. The net result is that you could experience '''system hangs''' or '''truncated recordings''' when using the affected versions of this card.
 
* There is a [http://ivtvdriver.org/trac/ticket/48 buggy DMA engine] in (at least some revisions of) this card. According to the bug report on the IVTV page, this affects the '''cx23415/6''' chipsets. The net result is that you could experience '''system hangs''' or '''truncated recordings''' when using the affected versions of this card.
 +
**More information on the DMA problem can be found on the [http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/DMA ivtv wiki].
 +
**The [[PCI Latency]] article describes howto change the latency of a PCI card and why you might need to. In summary, the latency of hard drive systems needs to be as high or higher than the capture card(s) so that the hard drives may handle the data throughput from the capture card(s). This does not happen in all systems by default and may require some experimentation. Some users have reported this as a fix.
 
* Does not produce VBI/Closed-Captioning data. See [[IVTV]].
 
* Does not produce VBI/Closed-Captioning data. See [[IVTV]].
 
* Hauppauge substituting HVR-1600s for PVR-150s.  Current PVR-150 boxes actually contain HVR-1600s.  Included is a note that says, "We have had a shortage of the WinTV-PVR-150 boards during the holiday season. Therefore, in place of the WinTV-PVR-150, we are including our new WinTV-HVR-1600"  It seems the HVR-1600 is NOT supported by [[IVTV]]. People receiving the HVR-1600 but paying for a PVR-150 should return the card to their vendor and demand a refund or a replacement with a real PVR-150.
 
* Hauppauge substituting HVR-1600s for PVR-150s.  Current PVR-150 boxes actually contain HVR-1600s.  Included is a note that says, "We have had a shortage of the WinTV-PVR-150 boards during the holiday season. Therefore, in place of the WinTV-PVR-150, we are including our new WinTV-HVR-1600"  It seems the HVR-1600 is NOT supported by [[IVTV]]. People receiving the HVR-1600 but paying for a PVR-150 should return the card to their vendor and demand a refund or a replacement with a real PVR-150.

Revision as of 16:03, 29 September 2008

PVR-150 MCE version
Hauppage PVR-150
Vendors Website http://hauppage.com/pages/products/data_pvr150mce.html
Input Formats not applicable
Support Status Supported. VBI data is supported in newer versions of the IVTV driver. Works fine even on Athlon64.
Driver IvTV 0.4.0 or newer. ** 0.4.2 is required if you have a Samsung tuner **
Sound Driver not needed. The hardware MPEG encoder will multiplex the audio with the video stream.
Chipset Conexant cx2341x


Description

The Newest version of HAUPPAUGE PVR-150 popular Video capture card. Derived from the PVR-250, but with cheaper design (Hauppauge's own statement). They are likely easier to find in a local store than the PVR-250. (A local fry's guy said he hadn't seen the PVR-250 on shelves in a while).

The PVR-150 is considered to be a highly stable, easy to work with analog video capture card with a built-in MPEG-2 encoder. The ease of setup and overall quality has made it one of the community's favorite cards to use in standard definition backends

As with the PVR-250, the PVR-150 card has gone through multiple revisions. The card called a PVR-150 MCE (pictured) does not contain a connection for a remote receiver, but it adds support for FM radio tuner and composite video. Older revisions of the card, typically called PVR-150, were sold with a remote and remote receiver, but lack the FM tuner and composite video inputs.

Hauppauge no longer ships any of the analog only (PVR) cards due to pressure from FCC.

IVTV

The driver for the Hauppauge PVR-150 is the excellent IVTV driver, which has an excellent Wiki. They have all the links you need to download the drivers and firmware and an excellent HOWTO for installing everything for various distributions.

The issues existing with the PVR-150's lack of VBI/Closed_captioning support happens to be with varying versions of the IVTV driver. Certain versions of the driver allow the PVR-150 to produce usable VBI data.

Issues and Problems

  • There is a buggy DMA engine in (at least some revisions of) this card. According to the bug report on the IVTV page, this affects the cx23415/6 chipsets. The net result is that you could experience system hangs or truncated recordings when using the affected versions of this card.
    • More information on the DMA problem can be found on the ivtv wiki.
    • The PCI Latency article describes howto change the latency of a PCI card and why you might need to. In summary, the latency of hard drive systems needs to be as high or higher than the capture card(s) so that the hard drives may handle the data throughput from the capture card(s). This does not happen in all systems by default and may require some experimentation. Some users have reported this as a fix.
  • Does not produce VBI/Closed-Captioning data. See IVTV.
  • Hauppauge substituting HVR-1600s for PVR-150s. Current PVR-150 boxes actually contain HVR-1600s. Included is a note that says, "We have had a shortage of the WinTV-PVR-150 boards during the holiday season. Therefore, in place of the WinTV-PVR-150, we are including our new WinTV-HVR-1600" It seems the HVR-1600 is NOT supported by IVTV. People receiving the HVR-1600 but paying for a PVR-150 should return the card to their vendor and demand a refund or a replacement with a real PVR-150.
  • IVTV driver doesn't recognize the card, and lspci -n shows card's vendor vendor:bus id as "4044:0016" instead of "4444:0016". Apparently this happens with some motherboards / chipsets, if you install the card in certain PCI slots. Usually, the first 3 slots (closest to the CPU) are primary PCI slots; the rest are connected via a PCI to PCI bridge. So moving the card to one of the first 3 slots will usually fix this.

Associated Software

PVR150 Remote - setting up lirc for the PVR-150

At least some models of the PVR 150 can send IR, not just receive it. This functionality is often call IR Blasting. It is useful for controlling external tuners. LIRC PVR-150 IR blaster support, version 3 describes how to set this up using a patched version of LIRC.

Log Messages

If you see an "Unreasonably low latency" message from ivtv in your logs you should probably read the page on PCI Latency

Installation guides

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0

See Installing MythTV on Debian Etch.

openSUSE 10.2

Geeko head48.png See installing mythTV on openSUSE 10.2

FAQs

Best info most likely found on the IVTV driver forum on Sourceforge. See also the wiki at: http://ivtv.writeme.ch/tiki-index.php