Hauppauge Win TV PC Card Problems

This article provides help and technical support to solve technical problems with the Hauppauge WinTV Nova T-500 DVB-T PVR card.

This TV card is compatible with the UK Freeview digital TV service and has a useful Personal Video Recorder (PVR) built in to allow the recording of MPEG2 TV programmes onto your PC hard drive. Twin DVB-T compatible tuners are provided to allow the user to watch one channel whilst recording another.

Unfortunately, since buying my WinTV card, it has been plagued with lip sync problems on any MPEG2 recording and has also suffered from software unreliability. To solve the reliability problems I recommend that you download the latest WinTV drivers (currently v7.0.27323 for Hauppauge WinTV Nova cards).

Solution to Lip Sync Problem

Lip synchronisation issues are apparent when viewing the DVB-T MPEG2 recordings on Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 and the lip sync is also out when the MPEG2 files created by the Hauppauge WinTV PVR are converted to DVD. The problem is worse on long recordings - when viewing towards the end of any MPEG2 recording made by the WinTV PVR.

To solve this annoying problem requires a DVB-T MPEG2 video re-synchronisation and decent 16:9 compatible DVD authoring software. After testing many combinations, VideoReDo Plus proved excellent at correcting the inherent lip sync problems on the Hauppauge recording files and Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6 produced high quality DVD's with no noticeable loss of video quality from the original when used to author the VideoRedo re-synchronised MPEG2 files onto DVD. You can buy VideoReDo for around £26 by Paypal from the website, with a 15 day fully functional trial version available for testing.

An alternative DVD authoring software is Nero, although when we tried it the resulting DVD had video flicker and was unwatchable on a test 16:9 PAL recording for the UK.

Ulead Movie Factory 6 Review

The Ulead DVD Movie Factory 6 software still gave the best video quality when authoring a DVD from the Hauppauge WinTV PVR Nova T-500. One word of caution though, the Ulead programme is memory hungry, so you'll need at least a Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor and 1GB (1024MB) RAM to successfully run it. When we tried the programme with 512MB of RAM, several 'unspecified errors' occurred at the end of the Title conversion process. Ulead technical support informed us that these errors were due to running out of memory.

When correcting the Hauppauge WinTV lip sync problem on any MPEG2 TV recording, all that is necessary is to open the MPEG2 video file created by WinTV PVR with VideoRedo Plus and to re-save the output file as .mpg. VideoRedo Plus is clever enough not to transcode any DVD compliant MPEG2 file from DVB-T sources, it merely carries out a re-synchronisation of the MPEG2 video and audio stream. The benefits of this are no loss of video quality and fast processing. Transcoding MPEG2 files takes a long time, even on a relatively fast Pentium 4 PC! Fortunately, the video and audio synchronisation process with VideoReDo takes only a few of minutes and the re-synchronised MPEG2 file will then play with no noticeable lip sync problems on Windows Media Player 11 as well as being usable for DVD authoring.

We hope this short article has been helpful in resolving technical problems with the MPEG2 files created by your Hauppauge WinTV PVR to allow it to make viable Freeview DVB-T recordings and high quality DVD's.

Disclaimer

Please note that Freeview DVB-T digital TV broadcasts may be subject to copyright and before recording or authoring DVD's the correct permission should be sought from the owner of the work. We do not condone illegal DVD's or encourage such practice.