Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Hauppauge HD-PVR

The Hauppauge HD-PVR isn't exactly new, but I've had it and have been using it extensively for a few years now, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it.
Overall, I'll say that the HD-PVR is a good unit and I'm glad it is on the market. There really isn't anything that competes with it at this point even though it has been out for several years now. (There are a few competitors that I know of, but they all fall short in some significant way.)

The pluses that I'll mention are:
- SPDIF 6 channel digital audio input and pass-thru.
- component pass-thru.
- variable bit rate encoding
- can be used with both PCs and Macs with at least 3 capture applications that I know of.
- resulting h.264/AC3 files can be re-muxed directly into a blu-ray without any re-compression needed.

The minuses I'll mention are:
- encoder seems fragile when it comes to dealing with less than perfect video inputs (and this will cause an encoder restart which will create about a 30 second gap in your recording for each glitch.)
- only 1 capture application option that I know of for Windows.
- some A/V sync issues when using the SPDIF input with certain hardware sources.
- as far as Hauppauge is concerned, there is only one officially supported capture application for this unit and that is the very old Capture Module in the included Total Media Extreme.

The competitors that I mentioned earlier would be: Elgato EyeTV HD (I own this unit and will comment on it in a separate entry), Blackmagic H.264 Pro Recorder (not shipping yet), AVerMedia AverTV HD DVR (I have no experience with this card.)

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