Talk:Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q

User Expereince

Overal Impression

This is my first video capture device and I really like it. It currently works great/excellent for ATSC (digital broadcast) but, at the time of writting, it doesn't work at all for NTSC (analog TV/cable). There is a patch[1] already available that fixes this problem, but I haven't tried it. (Note: that patch added analog support for that particular tuner IC, but it does NOT add support for this device. See article for details). I use WinTV-HVR-950Q on very modest hardware: an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop with 2GHz/500MB connected to a 1080p LCD TV through a VGA cable. Both my TV and the WinTV are connected to an internal amplified antenna (TERK HDTVa). This WinTV tuner is as good as my TV tuner: both found the same channels and have about the same video quality (even for 1080i broadcasts). (Note: the device has no impact upon digital video quality -- this dependent upon other factors like video decoder, rendering method, video drivers etc)

Note that it's critical to have a fast video card. My card, ATI Radeon 9000 32Mb, is not supported by ATI anymore, so I had to use the open source radeon driver instead of ATI's fglrx. If you use the default settings for the radeon driver, you will get a pitiful 170FPS in glxgears, which is NOT sufficient for watching digital TV. But after I used this xorg.conf file[2], I got about 1100FPS, which was sufficient. Of course, I had to do the following to get the best resolution on my TV (and a blank screen on my laptop):

xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA-0 --mode 1920x1080

Basic Installation

Connect the WinTV to a good antenna. Then download some tools (using your distribution installer: yum, apt-get, etc):

yum install dvb-apps mplayer

Then scan your ATSC channels. For example, to scan ATSC channels in US do

scandvb /usr/share/dvb-apps/atsc/us-ATSC-center-frequencies-8VSB > channels.conf

Then copy the file channels.conf to the directory .mplayer/ and test it on of one of the channels listed in channels.conf. For example, if you have a channel called KERA-HD, you do:

mplayer dvb://'KERA-HD'

In my case, for a 1080i broadcast, I had to use the following parameters:

mplayer dvb://'KERA-HD' -vo x11 -framedrop 1 

because of my slow video and audio cards.

TV Recording

Instead of using special software for TIVO-like recording (such as MythTV), I use simple scripts. I first created a file in my bin directory, called favorites.txt, with mnemonics for my favorite channels listed in channels.conf (these are actual their channel numbers). Example:

4 KDFW DT
5 KXAS-HD
11 KTVT-DT
13 KERA-HD

and use the following script, called tape, in my bin directory:

#!/bin/sh
ext=`date +'%m-%d-%H-%M-%S'`
tapeit='/tmp/tapeit-'${ext}
stopit='/tmp/stopit'
file='~/Videos/'${ext}'-'$1
pat='s/^'$1' //p;d'
chan=`sed "${pat}" ~/bin/favorites.txt`
if [ "${chan}" == "" ]; then echo "Valid channels:"; cat ~/bin/favorites.txt; exit; fi
echo "azap -r -c ~/channels.conf '${chan}' > /dev/null & cat /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 > ${file}" > ${tapeit}
echo 'killall -q azap cat' > ${stopit}
if [ "$2" = "now" ]; then sh ${tapeit}; else at -f ${tapeit} $2; fi
if [ -z "$3" ]; then at -f ${stopit} now + 1 hour; else at -f ${stopit} $3; fi

For example, to tape something on KDFW-DT (channel 4) between 5pm and 6pm you execute:

tape 4 5pm 6pm

(note that for a 1080i channel, you will need 6GB/hour disk space). The result will be written in the directory Video under a name that contains date/time/channel. Then you can use mplayer to watch this file.