Do It Yourself PVR
 

I've been using a ReplayTV since Christmas, and occasionally DVArchive to download shows from it for reprocessing to DVD-compatible MPEG2. I never really got into it full-bore, though; it was just too much bother to get the shows onto DVD to take with me in my travels. The main reason is the number of manual steps it seemed to require to get the shows in a compatible format for my DVD burning software.

This weekend, I added a Hauppage PVR-150 Tuner card that includes a hardware MPEG2 encoder to one of my desktop systems, and installed a free application called GBPVR. This, along with a subscription to Zap2It! (apparently also free, at least at the moment), makes my ReplayTV almost superfluous. The PC becomes a highly customizable media center, with a single point of control for watching and recording live TV, viewing DVDs, listening to MP3s and other music formats, listening to Net radio stations, viewing pictures, and even fetching your favorite comic strips from their respective web sites. The IR remote included with the PVR-150 can control all features of GBPVR.

Setting up post-processing of your recordings (automatic commercial skip, recoding to an alternate format, etc.) takes a little effort, but the source material is already DVD-compatible MPEG2 . . . this eliminates a lot of the effort previously required when dealing with the almost-MPEG2-compatible files produced by the ReplayTV.

If there are shows you're afraid of missing while traveling, this may be the solution for you. My investment so far is the $75 I paid for the PVR-150 card.

Are you getting any of the audio clipping on your WinTV PVR-150 board? Mine is going back due to the problems .....

Nice looking video - but the audio problems were killing me!

I heard there were issues with the early drivers for the 150 - are you up to date in that respect?

No, but I updated all drivers and supporting software to the latest versions available right after installing the board. Audio sounds great, actually . . . :D

I'm using a PVR150 with Media Center 2005 and it works perfectly. There are about a zillion different driver versions, though, it seems.

How does cable work? Does the signal get decoded by the box that I get, for example, from Time Warner? Does the PVR card have the ability to do this as well, so that I can plug the cable line directly into it? Or do I have to run the cable through the cable box first?

The PVR-150 comes with an IR Blaster for controlling a cable box, so if you need to use it to receive all channels, the 150 will handle it for you transparently.

Thanks - that's what I just figured out. Since the computer and cable box won't be in the same room, it looks like I'd have to shell out and additional $9/month for a 2nd box.

Tried different driver combinations for the better part of 2 days - finally took the hardware back to CC. I did like the on-board MPEG encoding ... very nice.