Revision as of 22:33, 15 January 2006

Hauppauge PVR-500 MCE

A.K.A.: pvr500

Vendor's Website: http://hauppage.com/pages/products/data_pvr500mce.html

Driver: IvTV 0.4.0 or newer.

Note: "MCE" in the name means simply that this model does not come with a remote control or Windows software for recording/viewing television. The CD-ROM that does come with it contains firmware and drivers for Windows XP Media Center Edition *only* (not XP Home and not XP Pro).

Support Status

Both tuners are supported (behaves like two PVR-150's). VBI data is not yet supported, so there will be no closed-captioning information available. Works fine even on Athlon64.

Description

Two TV tuners, two MPEG2 encoders, one FM radio tuner. Comes with a 75-ohm coax input for FM radio (and an antenna), 75-ohm coax input for cable/broadcast TV, two s-video inputs, two composite video inputs, and two stereo audio inputs.

Issues and Problems

Note that if you have other Video4Linux driver modules present (such as components of the bttv driver) the modules to drive the tuners may conflict with the ivtv modules and prevent the card's tuners from being properly detected.

You need a 2.6.x kernel (2.6.14 or newer recommended) to make this work properly. The tuners do not appear to function with a 2.4.x kernel.

Warning: (This is common to the IvTV driver) Do *not* attempt to enable pre-emptive kernel locks in your kernel configuration--the ivtv modules do not get along with them and will cause spontaneous reboots.

Associated Software

Nothing yet ...

Installation guides

Nothing yet ...

FAQs

Nothing yet ...

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...)