HTPC Update

Hauppage finally sent back my PVR 500 card. They were nice enough to do a RMA even though I had already had it for months. It never worked and never worked and new drivers never made it work, so they finally fixed it. Or maybe they sent a new one? Who cares, now every channel is crisp and clear. A good SD signal with a good encoder actually looks pretty good on a LCD. Deinterlacing is nice too, but it makes my system lag a bit...

Also, I got a response from Snapstream about problems with my beyond TV installation. They said it was a HD problem. After inspection, it looks like I had my master HD in the slave spot and the slave HD in the master spot. Swapping that and it seemed to work through the night, fingers crossed.

Beyond TV Issues

The HTPC in the bedroom has issues. We have a WinTV 500 MCE card that does hardware encoding of two channels at once. Problem is, it is very grainy, especially on low channels. Even the good channels are wavy. I have tried everything to get it to work, but finally I am sending it back to Hauppage to get replaced. For now, it does a moderately terrible job of tuning stations.

I settled on Beyond TV as my software. It was easy to use and it worked. Compared to my problems setting up MythTV and Media Portal, Beyond was super simple and it worked. Mostly. After I had actually paid to register the software ($100) we realized that it crashed every night if you were watching live TV. Great. Now I have to try to get it working to a point where it is stable.

But really, the main advantage of this setup is the mpg files it records in: They are playable on the Tivo HD. I can record TV shows on the HTPC then move them to the Tivo. It also works with DVDs. So we have two more tuners and nearly a TB of storage added to our AV system.