Typhoon USB PVR

stevenmu

With all the TV-In/Out threads going on at the moment, I thought I'd add to the load and see if anybody got one of these from Lidl a while back and what their impressions are of it (and theres a better chance of relevant responses from here than from typhoon support).

I got my hands on one the other day and I'm not very impressed by it so far. The quality seems pretty poor, I would have imagined it would be close to TV quality but it seems very grainy. On one or two channels the reception does seem poor but on others it looks like it's the quality of the stream itself is poor. Regarding reception it's connected to NTL basic cable, the reception is very good on a TV but the Typhoon only seems to pick up 3 or 4 channels, are others using it with cable, how have ye found it ?

From the quality of the stream I kind of have a feeling that maybe it's only operating in USBv1.1 mode not USB2, altough I have XP SP1a installed with the latest forceware (MSI K8N Neo Plat mobo with NF3 250GB chipset). Does anyone know of any utilities to check how USB devices are connected and what kind of bandwidth they're using ?

dabhal

I would guess that it was cheap(Lidl) which means that it is probably using your PC for all the processing rather than the card itself, hey you get what you pay for. How much was it?

stevenmu

They were €80 iirc which is pretty dear for lidl, and it has a built in MPEG 4 encoder.

heggie

why the hell would u want a usb 2 tv card? usb 1.1 is more than capable of recording tv.

Chalk

ive never heard of anyone using usb1.1 to transfer video.

the transfer speed is 1.5mbps whereas mpeg2 can go over 6mbps.

thats why usb2 came out and why firewire is popular

stevenmu

heggie wrote:

why the hell would u want a usb 2 tv card? usb 1.1 is more than capable of recording tv.

Well, it comes as a usb 2 device, there's not much I can do about that now.

Chalk wrote:

ive never heard of anyone using usb1.1 to transfer video.

the transfer speed is 1.5mbps whereas mpeg2 can go over 6mbps.

thats why usb2 came out and why firewire is popular

That makes sense, I was testing it last night and there seems to be no difference in quality between the 1.5mbps and 6mbps bit rate settings.

Chalk

i forgot to mention i have one of these.
quality is excellent on the av-in.

alos recorded a vhs tape over coaxial perfectly.

the tv stations can be hit and miss.
i have the cable split about 3 times before it gets to the typhoon tho.
ive found the quality to be quite godd when connected directly, but still not as clear as tv reception.

mpeg2 at 1500kbps shouldnt look grainy as such.
there will be more artifacting, [square blocks with the wrong color] during fast moving scenes but nothing severe.

have you connecected it directly to your pc [no hub] and using BOTH usb cables?

stevenmu

I've connected it every way I can think of, direct and hub using just one or both cables.

It's nice to hear that they can have good quality, I'll have to give AV a go and see what that's like. I've been checking around various pvr and tv-tuner sites and nobody seems to have one but it seems identical to one made by lifeview called a TV Walker and people seem happy enough with those too.

My current line of thinking is that the signal isn't string enough even though it seems good on a TV. I'd imagine that any fuzz or grain in the signal would cause havoc in the encoder, and the grain I get in output looks like lots of tiny little artifacts. I'll give the AV-in a go and if that seems ok it probably is the signal (I should really have thought of that sooner) and I can look at getting something to boost and clean it.

Cheers.