Bye Bye Oh most crappy Hauppague WinTV USB =:P

[enteirah]

Hmm... a bit of a mixture of luck today so far. My new USB2 TV Card arrived this afternoon, and is a huge improvement on the pathetic excuse from Hauppauge, seeing as it has an MPEG2 hardware encoder, and uses USB2 to send stuff to the computer. The software isn't up to much, although that seems to be something everyone has found. I must give thanks to an anonymous tip-off for setting me onto this thing. =:) Most places were charging around 150, although in the end I got it for considerably less as I picked up a return from Dabs. As always, Dabs package these things properly (could teach Ebuyer a thing or two about packaging!), although I still don't like those electronic signature devices Parcel Force use. What's wrong with paper?

On the minus side, the control switch on the boiler kind of went off with a bang this morning. Although it's turned off now, and safe enough, the smell of burnt plastic from when it went is still lingering around a little several hours later. Gah!

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that sounds like a nice little toy! Don't suppose it handles NTSC as well as PAL, does it? And maybe has open source drivers kicking around? (Or just OS X support) How about straightforward composite/S-video input? Is the data stream DV compatible?

At least the boiler let you know audibly that it was feeling unhappy with its lot in life. I once put a prototype card into one of my development systems at the last gig, clicked the side shut, turned it on, and.. soon, I.. smelled something. That acrid air of something electronic giving its last gasp.. ^_^;; I darted around the room (only about 10x10' - my office used to be the network switch room, and indeed still had the patch panels :) to sniff out the problem, and quickly yanked power from it, literally. (Thankfully, nothing to do with my card's installation - seems the PSU just decided that'd be a funny time to commit suicide)

[enteirah]

And maybe has open source drivers kicking around?

Well, someone is supposed to have written some basic Linux drivers for it, althought I haven't tried them yet. I can't remember if they're open source or not.

How about straightforward composite/S-video input?

Both. It has four sockets on the front. Composite, S-Video and Left and Right audio, and an additional one on the back for ye olde Analogue RF input.

Is the data stream DV compatible?

I'm fairly certain that's a no. It does have the prerequisite number of little flashy LEDs to make up for things though - 5 I think (it's not in front of me just now), which dance from left to right when booting up Windows with it connected. =:D

The three main problems I've found with it so far are:-

1) The Remote Control for it just happens to run on the same IR frequencies as my VCR remote. =:o
2) The software is horrible. I mean, in order to use the Teletext app, they decided to install an entire Web Server, which it automatically tries to open with Internet Explorer. It still doesn't work though. I think I'll uninstall that.
3) The driver for use with 3rd Part apps so far is refusing to work with any of them. I haven't played about with this much yet though, but it would be nice to get it running in DScaler and VirtualDub.