Buck said:
I spent half the day trying to install a TV card in my PC (Athlon 64 Dual
Core 4200 2.2 GHz with 2 GB of RAM). I have an nVidia 256MB video card.
The first card I tried (Happauge 1600) had jerky audio and video on analog
(cable). I tried using HW acceleration, but that did nothing. I then tried
tuning an HD channel over the antenna, and the app crashed.
Could I not adequate HW for a TV card, whether it be analog or digital?
Are these things inherently unreliable and quirky?
Any recommendations on what to buy, or how to make the Happauge work?
Thanks for any help.
You meet the minimum requirements. A P4 2.2GHz is recommended. A 2.2GHz
Athlon64, multiply by 1.5x, gives a P4 equivalent of 3.3GHz, so you're
50% higher than the minimum using only one of your cores.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1600.html
If I had to guess, I'd say the dual core wasn't set up right
in some way. Some of the tweaks are covered here. (Usually, with
threads like this one, it pays to read to the end, to see if
any changes to the recommendations were made. If the original
poster kept updating the lead article, then it would be up to
date, but sometimes things are discovered later.)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=60416
A quick workaround, might be to go into Task Manager
and "set affinity" for the player program. That keeps
it from bouncing between cores while it is running. That
is used on some games, to make them run properly. I don't know
if the same issues can arise with the driver or not. I would
think that the driver wouldn't be doing any "heavy lifting",
as the idea is to just DMA chunks of data from the card,
into system memory. The player actually decodes the MPEG
coming from the card, to render an image on the screen.
For recording, nothing would have to be done, but to write
the data to disk. So the hardware you bought, as I understand
it from the Hauppauge page, doesn't help with playback (viewing).
I don't see a reason to buy more hardware just yet.
Occasionally, there are posters whose setups are only
running the core at minimum speed (low multiplier) all
the time. I hope that isn't the problem.
To monitor your setup, there is a utility on the AMD download page.
The URL is wrong, and I think the actual file you want would be
this one. Check when this starts to install, that it says it
is Power Monitor 1.2.0 .
"AMD Power Monitor Version 1.2.0 - AMD Power Monitor displays the
current frequency, voltage, utilization, and power savings of each
core on each processor in a system."
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/powersetup.exe
That is from this download page. I used web.archive.org to figure out
that instead of "setup.exe", the file should have been "powersetup.exe".
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html
Paul
