WholeHome

Some tips concerning Hauppauge cards – specifically the internal PCI and PCI-e cards – call it a FAQ for the DIY’er

• Both the Windows Media Center cards and the non-Windows Media center cards will work in Media center, Hauppauge’s own WinTV application, and third party apps like GB-PVR. The main difference is in whether the cards have an IR in/out port or whether they rely on a supplementary system to handle IR
• Drivers are the same whether you use these cards on standard windows or the media center version.
• Make sure you have the “right” drivers – yes this sounds straightforward, but the Hauppauge website is confusing. The 150/250/350 cards are under support – Wintv-pvr NOT the legacy PCI card selection. Those older drivers “kind-of-work” and have really wasted a lot of folks time until they figured out they are not the right ones. A major way to tell is if your recording is taking up HUGE amounts of disk space the internal MPEG encoder is not running and either you have the wrong driver or something is set up wrong.
• Generally, Hauppauge requires you to have the original cd that came with your card even if you download the new driver package from their website – do not lose that cd or you will be ordering another one.
• The 150/250/350 cards will auto recognize under media center once the right drivers are installed – the external HD-PVR is not supported natively under windows media center as a recognized tuner (which makes sense since it is really just a stand alone HD-mpeg encoder) but with third party applications like dblink, you can fool media center into thinking just about anything is a tuner (even the network connected tuners for instance)…
• Except for media center, which handles guide information automatically, you will need to use a converter like mc2xml to grab data off a guide service, convert to a standard xml file, and upload to the PVR software of your choice. This pretty much applies regardless of what software you choose.
• For media center computers (and a number of third party apps) if you are building a custom setup – you will likely need an MPEG decoder. Strangely enough, that is one piece that is still a “must purchase” and a critical part of any system.

More to come