I have the Hauppauge Nova-T-500, and generally, I have to say that it is very good. However, I have noticed some slight blurring, namely when credits are scrolling across the screen at the end of a program, and you can't quite read them. With a bog-standard £15 digibox, this doesn't happen - is there any reason why the Hauppauge card might be doing this? I'm using an Nvidia 7100GS graphics card.
That 'blurring' you refer to has nothing to do with the T-500 at all. Its caused by the video card & driver and the setup of those elements in your system when you play back a live stream from the T-500 or a recorded stream from a hard drive.
A £15 Freeview Digibox has dedicated MPEG2 hardware to cope with these issues... unfortunately currently much of the special hardware in your video card is not exploited as well as it could be because the manufacturers closed source drivers do implement it. Intel interestingly have the least capable GPU hardware (compared to nVidia/ATI) but in our assessment currently have the best MPEG2 hardware support in their drivers...so MPEG2 playback performance is often measurably better on their GPU's.
All the best
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the reply. This makes a lot of sense; as with the VIA UniChrome graphics we discussed previously, it sounds like we're waiting for the drivers to catch up with the hardware.
