New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:

TV Tuner Lag

post #1 of 7
11/26/05 at 12:59pm
Thread Starter 
Morning, I have a Dell 9300 and I plan to add the Hauppauge PVR-USB2 TV Tuner. Doing some search here, I read about lag. Specifically, what does this mean?

Is the TV quality slow and somewhat choppy, or does the lag mean that I'm a second or 2 behind what someone in the other room who has direct cable connect sees (eg - a ballgame where the tv with cable shows the start of a pitch, and me with the Dell/TV Tuner viewing the same game is a second away from seeing the same pitch).
Reply
Reply
post #2 of 7
11/26/05 at 1:31pm
Only lag I can think of is associated with hooking up a game console and trying to play. There will be some lag from the time you a push a button to the time an action takes place
Reply
Reply
post #3 of 7
11/26/05 at 3:10pm
The lag is because the PVR puts out an already encoded MPEG stream which your laptop feeds into an 8Mb buffer. WinTv then reads that buffer and displays it on the screen. They do it that way to ensure smooth display. The picture quality is really quite good and the lack of encoding overhead makes it a good card to TIVO with. The lag is about 1 or 2 seconds, meaning it is not good for Video Games, but can be reduced to mere milliseconds with the sacrifice of picture quality.

PS the screen cap in my sig was made from my Hauppauge PVR USB2
Reply
Reply
post #4 of 7
12/1/05 at 12:41am
yah I wish I would have got the pvr version because I don't plan on using my xbox on it but I did hook my xbox up to my software encoding version and there was no noticeable lag.
Reply
Reply
post #5 of 7
12/10/05 at 3:30pm
right, the lag meats you will be a few seconds behind what is live. Lag can be eliminated with a program called dscaler (www.dscaler.com). I use it on my desktop to play ps2 all the time, works great, assuming your tuner card is compatible.
Reply
Reply
post #6 of 7
12/10/05 at 4:02pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by mr. roboto
right, the lag meats you will be a few seconds behind what is live. Lag can be eliminated with a program called dscaler (www.dscaler.com). I use it on my desktop to play ps2 all the time, works great, assuming your tuner card is compatible.
Wow, I didnt know there was such a program, thanks a bunch.
Reply
Reply
post #7 of 7
6/2/06 at 2:01pm
Best is to use dscaler together with a SAA7134 PCI capture card. Just look that someone mentioned to have the card working if you don't know the tuner to check beforehand by installing 4.1.15 and having a look at the tuner list.

If you have a 7134 card AND the tuner is compatible than you have the best setup. PVR cards lack far behind in picture quality. Keep in mind that digital satelite reception using good tools (like progdvb or pouchintv with dscaler 5) will allways give better video quality.

USB cards will never ever match the quality of a SAA713x card run with dscaler. If you don't have an PCI slot get an PCMCIA card (like ADSTech Dual PCMCIA TV or Avermedia) and run it with dscaler Dshow mode. You don't get the same great quality but all features like teletext and tv-programm and tivo (in Europe) with overlay do work (contrary to any USB card in analogue).

Dscaler rules!
Reply
Reply
New Posts  All Forums:Forum Nav:
  Return Home
  Back to Forum: Notebook Audio & Video