Tech: Hauppauge PVC-250

Yesterday I received my Hauppauge Win-PVR-250. Here are my first impressions. Plugging and installing the card was a breeze, and surprisingly it worked on the first try (installing these cards has always proved to be a nightmare). I managed to capture a few minutes of TV within half an hour of unpacking the thing, so I'm quite happy with that. The remote works well, but looks very cheaply made. Let's hope I can get my universal remote to work with it. The recording quality was excellent. I wanted to stress-test the thing so I turned on the scheduler and set it up to tape 4 straight hours of TV during the night. I made sure I had enough hard drive space to record such a lengthy movie. When I woke up to check the results, the program had crashed.

I believe I can blame some of the problems I’ve had on the machine it is installed in. You see the goal of buying this card was to turn my old 350 mhz AMD into a dedicated PVR. The problem is that this computer has also been used as a file server for my other computers, as well as an e-mule machine and home security center (alert system, movement detection and security camera system). The system was already showing signs of struggle with its tasks so far, adding PVR functionality on top of that has proven unwise. Capture quality substantially declined when all the other functions (security/server/file sharing) were enabled. I suspect it to be a combination of low memory, CPU overuse and hard drive access saturation. I believe the overnight crash can also be attributed to this overload.

That probably means I’ll have to buy another computer, either a cheap second hand 450-700 mhz to use as a dedicated PVR, or simply buy a new state-of-the-art machine and move my 1.2 ghz to a role of dedicated PVR, keeping my 350 as the security center/emule/file server it has always been. Or vice-versa. I’ll have to think about it.

I’ll have a more thorough review of the card once I find the time to test it out more.