A little background:
My old - actually, ancient - Shuttle-based PVR system decided to more or less give up on me. It still worked, but the old Shuttle case had a poor habit of overheating. An easily predictable consequence of the form factor, no doubt, but let's not forget the poor old thing was merrily cranking away recording live TV and playing back edited videos for many, many years.
Time to upgrade. I figured, if a lousy old Shuttle SS54G could handle it, who knows what I could do with a modern Core series processor and an SSD?
So I go get a little system built, scavenging the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 TV capture cards out of the old Shuttle. Hell, they're perfectly good, and they're on the BeyondTV compatibility list. They have hardware encoding and do a fine job. Anyone who tells you that you need uber-great hardware to code NTSC TV is crazy. (HD is another story, maybe.)
The old system used SageTV, which has been unavailable since Google purchased it. I chose BeyondTV partly because it does near-real-time transcoding to DivX, which saves me BUCKETS of time when editing my shows. AND it takes the guesswork out of what settings to use for transcoding, which is a big convenience as well.
So, plug er in. And the video sucks. LiveTV is super-choppy - not that I care, I do not use it as a TV front end. Eventually I get it working well enough, and the first recording looks grrrrreat, but LiveTV still does not work right. I'm rather pissed, as the WinTV-PVR 150 cards have hardware encoding, so WTF? But OK.
Next day, it's all gone south. BeyondTV is stuck transcoding a file - not a good sign. Some resets get it going again, only to show that the subsequent recordings are uselessly scrambled. LiveTV does not work.
I already installed the latest Hauppauge drivers, but I uninstall and reinstall the hardware. No good. Try taking out some splitters and cables, although the system worked A-OK on the old Shuttle. Still no good.
Now, Hauppauge has a note saying these drivers only work on 64-bit systems with less than 4 Gb of RAM. Mine has 4. Windows reports mine as 3.9 Gb, which I thought was good enough. Apparently not. In this case, they really mean LESS, not "less than or equal to 4 Gb".
(Note that I did ask the shop for 32-bit Windows, but I waffled in front of the sales clerk. He changed it to 64-bit, but neglected to change it back when I reverted to my original choice. Not his fault, really, and he offered to re-image it, but I decided to take the chance. BeyondTV only supports 32-bit users.)
The solution comes from this thread at videohelp.com, where artificially limiting your system RAM to 4095 kB via msconfig is used to tell Windows you have just less than 4 Gb of RAM.
In case the thread goes MIA, here is the method as described by the_man_one (with a few spelling changes):
limit the reported ram with msconfig by:
- run msconfig from command prompt or command line
- boot tab
- advanced settings
- check maximum memory
- add the value 4095
- reboot
After setting msconfig as recommended, everything works beautifully. LiveTV works, both tuners work, everything seems to just work. I have not tried the ShowSqueeze again, but reports are that hanging ShowSqueeze occurs when the MPG recordings are garbled, which was undoubtedly the case here.
So yet another x64 driver issue. I guess the poor driver was getting all confused with itself.
Time to delete all the recordings and start over. We'll see.
Note that you do not need your original Hauppauge CD to install the latest drivers. You can get drivers only or drivers + software - look carefully at the available tabs on the page - without difficulty, and at no point was I asked for my original CD (which I have).
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