Improving Hauppauge SDTV Capture Quality

I use a Hauppauge PVR150MCE to capture analog TV in my HTPC and there’s a couple of things you can do to get higher quality recordings. These tips should also work for at least the PVR500 and maybe some of the other Hauppauge cards. For more info the SHSPVR forum is a good start.

1. Use the S-Video input if you’re connecting an STB. The antenna and composite input has poor image quality especially if you receive PAL.

2. If you’re forced to use the antenna or composite input and receive PAL there’s some registry settings available in the thread PVR150/500 Comb Tweaks at SHSPVR which modifies the comb filter. There’s a zip with registry files in the last post but read through the other posts so you understand what they do.

3. Hauppauge tweak tool gives easy access to a lot of settings. The screenshot below shows which settings work for me. The 150/500 advanced section concern some filters which affect composite/antenna and also lets you access the driver control panel.

4. Boost the bitrate of your recordings. Most PVR applications lets you set this in the applications configuration and there’s settings in the Hauppauge driver control panel which I think affects Windows Media Center and Hauppauges own software. My settings for  the default medium recording quality in GBPVR is shown below.

Using the above settings I have a hard time telling the difference between the recordings from my dvb-t card and the recordings coming from my IPTV box into the PVR150MCE. The analog recordings does get a little more grainy especially when there’s a lot of motion but it’s nothing you really notice unless you compare them side by side.

Speedfan

I recently bought a Gigabyte motherboard and a Intel e2160 to use in my desktop PC and have been perfectly happy with them except for Gigabytes EasyTune software that control fan speeds and over/underclocking. It has been very crashprone and looks awful so I started to look for alternatives.

Logitech Vista Drivers

Logitech’s software for Vista hasn’t got any support for my Logitech Internet Keyboard so it’s impossible to use the special keys which is a shame. Before buying a new keyboard I tried some different things and nothing seemed to work but as a last try I installed Microsoft’s Intellitype and it works beautifully. All the special keys are recognized and easily changed. If there are keys that doesn’t work one can probably remap them to something useable with this guide: US Netizen remap keys. I haven’t tried it though.

Edit: Found a link which describes some other options including the Microsoft one: Logitech forum.

The Best Free HTPC/PVR Applications

This is a list of the best free HTPC/PVR applications available and my thoughts on them.

Remote Laziness

Sometimes it’s nice to be able execute commands on networked computers. I have mapped a key on my HTPC remote to use the commandline tool PsExec and an AutoIt script to pause/resume playback in Foobar on my desktop computer which is useful when the phone rings or when you are just too lazy to walk in to the work room and turn off the music. There’s a Gui for PsExec that makes it a little easier to find the right settings. Things to keep in mind is that you have to have users with passwords and turn off simple file sharing.

Netvibes

When it comes to start pages/rss readers Netvibes most definitely is the dogs bollocks. It looks good, has an abundance of options and my only real quibble with it is that sometimes some feeds doesn’t update properly but it doesn’t happen too often. The calendar with the ability to add events used in the screen shot below can be found in Netvibes Ecosystem. Good alternatives to Netvibes are yourminis and Pageflakes.

Edit: I didn’t take IGoogle into consideration since it only shows a maximum of 9 items per feed but I tried it again since Netvibes was acting up a little and there’s a gadget that allows you to have feeds with more than 9 items called CustomRSS Gadget. There’s still no indication of unread articles though so I think I’ll stick with Netvibes for the time being.

Decking out Firefox

The beauty of Firefox is that it can pretty much be what you want it to be. Below is a screenshot of my Firefox and a list of the addons I use with some comments.

Music Library Mayhem

Managing a computer music collection can be a somewhat daunting task as it begins to grow. If you are constantly adding new music from a lot of different sources it’s really hard to keep organized and it soon becomes a big mess. There’s a lot of different strategies to bring order to the chaos and here’s what works for me.

AutoIt

AutoIt is an easy to use scripting and automation software. You create simple basic like scripts and compile them as exe files. I don’t know anything about programming but AutoIt is so easy to use and it doesn’t take to much effort to create something that would be very complex if you used any other scripting tool.

IE7Pro

I sometimes use Internet Explorer to play games at MSN and I have really missed some of my favorite Firefox features like ad blocking, super drag&drop and gestures. Freeware addon IE7Pro adds most of them and the only fault with it was that it selected it’s own version of google search at install but it was easily remedied by unselecting it during installation or in the IE7Pro preferences in IE. This software isn’t good enough to make me stop using Firefox but it’s certainly very impressive and very easy to install.

Link to IE7Pro user guide.