New Half-Height PVR card...

[JasonJoel]

I think this would be a GOD SEND if it works in SageTV... Mainly because I would like to make a mini-ITX PVR machine which only has half-height PCI slots on the case...

About time someone made a half-height PCI hardware PVR card!

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=1&submit=Go&description=mpg600

Anyone want to pick one up and try it out for me? :D

Jason

[nicktripp]

Hot! :nod:

[Crazedz]

Hmm this might work well in that mini atx system i got without paying enough attention to make sure it would fit my full size cards. Hey were all allowed at least one stupid mistake right?

May have to order one out. It should work as it uses the same Conexant CX23416 as is on the PVR 250. Have to wait a couple weeks though to get together enough Green.

[Narflex]

Cool. :) That should work with the current version of Sage.

[Crazedz]

Ok iv'e ordered one out so i guess we'll see next week once it arrives if it works or not.

[JasonJoel]

Great, let us know!

I bet it works fine.. Looking through their drivers, there doesn't seem to be anything special going on.

Whichever drivers work for the 'Freestyle' Conexant based PVR cards should work for this one.

Jason


Originally posted by Crazedz
Ok iv'e ordered one out so i guess we'll see next week once it arrives if it works or not.

[Crazedz]

Ok i got the card today.

I was up working on my room (walls all torn down wires exposed) and had cut the power to transfer my outlets (plus add some) to new gang boxes...... And well thats off topic anyway i couldn't try it out right away as the pc was hooked up in that room for the time being.

Anyway i took a quick look at it and everything was their, the remote is almost credit card thin and uses a thin disk type battery like the kind in a pc for the clock and bios settings. It's well the remote is different that's for sure. The card itself is nice and small looks pretty kewl. The remote reciever connects right to the board by what looks at first like an audio connection and uses a slit on the bracket to run the cord out of the case.

After i got the power up and running i put the card in hooked up the cable line and turned my system on it came up and saw the new hardware and proceeded to ask for the drivers so i put in the disk. After getting them installed i rebooted the pc and decided to take a look at sage to see if it saw the card at all. Sure enough it saw a third tuner. A Python2 to be exact and so i set it up and went in to have it record something to see how well it would work. It recorded the screensavers on my default setting of 1 gig per hour which didn't look quite as good as my PVR250 but i thought it might be because i used a slid on cable connector as it was the only one around at the time. Otherwise the show recorded fine and everything worked it kept perfect sync. I did notice though that the card has the same skip problem of the pvr250 so it does the same frame skip once in a while. After that i had it record something on another channel and this time the video looked much better (About the same as the pvr250) under the same settings. So i was happy about that and decided to see if i could get the remote working.

I quit out of sage and ran the software install program and installed the programs. The software doesn't appear to come with a remote launcher app like hauppauge does and after checking the install folder and looking at the cd and the help file for the program i discovered that this is indeed the case. I guess yuan decided we can start the software ourselves. After launching the DVD Encoder program the remote starts to work and the software has some likeable things about it like being able to adjust the brightness, contrast, color and saturation settings while seening the playback. Unfortunatly it is running in timeshift mode and also seems to record the display adjustment in the recording which i found odd and kind of redundant as well as bad for any recording you may want to keep. Anyway the power button once pressed doesn't put the program to sleep but shut's it down and i found only two ways to relaunch it either by double clicking the program icon on the desktop or by useing the scheduling program that comes with it to setup recordings.

So the card is good it works great but the software isn't all that great kinda in keeping with the trend and the remote could fit the hand better and isn't useable with sage unless it can be made to work with girder or Narflex put's support in sage for it. I haven't taken the time to look to closely at the other software that comes with the card but i found that the DVD encoder cd has 4 apps for converting video's and editing them as well as producing dvd's. I haven't looked at the PowerProducer DE cd yet so i can't say anything about that.

All in all i'd say it's pretty good and comes with alot and works well with sage though it would have been better if they had included a better remote and some software to make it work with other programs. The price at $130 is nice so if you want to do a low profile system then this card works just be aware you'll need some other remote than the one supplied.

Well that's my review of the card i know iv'e only had it for less than a day but i tried to give it a good looking over in that time and so far it does work nicely and I think it will fit my sage box for the living room perfectly.

Now i just need a remote to use on it.

[JasonJoel]

Thanks for the review! As expected, it worked fine.

As far as video, although some of the components affect input signal quality, the fact that the card uses the same encoder cip as the PVR250 indicates that picture quality should be similar.

I tell you, with everything going on with home PVR stuff things are getting really exciting. Lots of really cool SFF PC's, 'quiet' PC components, etc.

Good time for PC based PVR. :) Now if Frey could just get Sage Client installed on a Hauppage MediaMVP, I would be in HEAVEN. I REALLY hope that will happen! Please, please, please...

Jason

[fidget]

Originally posted by JasonJoel
Now if Frey could just get Sage Client installed on a Hauppage MediaMVP, I would be in HEAVEN. I REALLY hope that will happen! Please, please, please...I, for one, would definitely pay extra to be able to have the SageTV client in the MediaMVP. Being able to watch live TV streams along with the recorded would be really nice. I just put together an EPIA system for driving my TV and it wasn't very cheap.

[Crazedz]

Originally posted by JasonJoel
Thanks for the review! As expected, it worked fine.

As far as video, although some of the components affect input signal quality, the fact that the card uses the same encoder cip as the PVR250 indicates that picture quality should be similar.

I tell you, with everything going on with home PVR stuff things are getting really exciting. Lots of really cool SFF PC's, 'quiet' PC components, etc.

Good time for PC based PVR. :) Now if Frey could just get Sage Client installed on a Hauppage MediaMVP, I would be in HEAVEN. I REALLY hope that will happen! Please, please, please...

Jason

Been thinking about the MediaMVP myself as well and yeah it would be a whole lot nicer with sage software on it.

Yeah it worked like a charm right off the bat and as far as the video quality it was as i suspected the cheap slid on coax cable i used to get the cable signal to the card. I replaced it with a better screw on cable and the quality was just the same to my eye as the pvr 250, at least i couldn't tell the difference.

Yeah i can't wait to see what comes out in the upcomming months before christmas..... Maybe i should have waited to see what else would come out lol.

Originally posted by fidget
I, for one, would definitely pay extra to be able to have the SageTV client in the MediaMVP. Being able to watch live TV streams along with the recorded would be really nice. I just put together an EPIA system for driving my TV and it wasn't very cheap.


I'm kinda going the cheaper route (Though not sure if it is really) to get my HTPC. I found case mobo setup that looked nice but as stated before i kinda missed noticing the low profile cards only disclaimer.
Metis 266 at pricegrabber (http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=671617/ut=447539abe84cd203)

It's the Metis 266 from MSI and it does look nice the power supply is beefier than i wanted but it will work with a faster proccesor which i wanted as well for some games i plan on having on the system. So i wanted something more than a EPIA system but i also wanted it to not look like a PC in the livingroom and the Metis fit the bill. I went through AccuPC and got it for $113.50 so it seemed a good price to me, Even more so now that i got a card to go into it. Now i just have to figure out which of the other 2 tuners i want to get rid of or if i want to get rid of both and go with another MPG600 and a remote or the mediaMVP or both.

What to do what to do.........

[rrussell]

How much heat does that little tuner card put out?

Enquiring minds, etc etc...

[Crazedz]

It seems to be doing ok.

It is warm but from quick observasion not to warm. I can hold my hands on it and feel some warmth comming from it but it's not like my pvr250 under the 15 chipset which feels quite hot. The hottest chip on the mpg600 does feel warm almost hot but not to hot that i can't leave my fingers their. The pvr 250 feels hot to quite a bit hotter on the heatsink i think my skin would sear off if the heatsink wasn't their, It's to hot to leave my fingers their for any length of time. So i can tell their is a major heat difference from the 2 cards from that and from just feeling the air around the two cards i can tell the mpg600 is much cooler. I haven't checked out myself the pvr250's under the 16 chipset but im pretty sure the results would be similar.

I can say i would rather have the mpg600 in my sage box than either the pvr250 15 or my dvcr going solely on the basis of heat i think the mpg600 wins hands down. I have to say the 16 chipset was well done and it's a shame it didn't come out sooner.

It's a very nice little card kudos to Yuan on it.

[mikbro]

I too am looking at picking up this card, thanks for 'taking one for the team'.

I wonder about the drivers for the card, do they use the same driver set as the Hauppauge? If so what version? With all the discussions about problems and new/beta drivers over at shspvr (and driver specific discussion), I am curious.

[SHS]

Sorry mikbro you must use the drivers that come with the card due to the diff audio chip which I belive is a sony.

[Crazedz]

I used the driver provided by Yuan because i wanted to make sure my tests would be clean and not skewed by trying drivers not written for the card since even if the hauppauge drivers might have worked most people would use the yuan drivers to start with anyway.

I haven't looked at the shspvr site so i don't know what the problem is to which your refering in this reguard. If you could provide a link or more detail then i could better understand the problem.

And NP i was happy to help out plus i needed a low profile card like this anyway for my sage box and if it didn't work then i was sure that narflex would get it working so it really wasn't to much of a risk..... I think it wasn't anyway.

[rrussell]

Wow, this sounds like a great little card.

[rrussell]

Wow, this sounds like a great little card.

[dkardatzke]

Echo....Echo

[Crazedz]

Originally posted by rrussell
Wow, this sounds like a great little card.

Yeah and the price is nice as well.

I have noticed however that this card also has the same audio glitch as the pvr250/350 where the recorded shows come across at a lower audio level. Might need a reg edit for it as well to boost the audio levels, though im not sure how and where to do that at this time. I'll have to do some more looking into that.

It's like the pvr250 in so many ways it's kinda scary. Even the ir reciever though it connects differently to the card has the same reciever end as the pvr250. I think they basicly copied hauppauge on it but made it low profile which is very good from the 3rd party prospective, It just works and that's the kewl thing about it.

Now i'd really like to come up with a way to make the ir work with either the included remote or preferably (because it's a better looking fitting one) with hauppauges silver remote.

Anybody have any ideas on that?

[roddym4]

Hi.

This is my first post.

Based on the thread, I went ahead and bought this card. However, after an uneventful install, I can't get Sage to see it.

I then installed the bundled software, and I user the DVDEncoder software to watch TV via the tuner, and record MPG2 without a problem. However, when I close this program, it crashes.

Help is appreciated.

WINME
Ath XP2200
256MB DDR RAM
Albatron KM266Pro
nVIDIA Geforce 4 MX440 8X DDR 64MB AGP
80 Gig
Sage 1.4 Trial
Yuan MPG600 PCI TV
WMP 9
DX9.0b

[Crazedz]

Originally posted by roddym4
Hi.

This is my first post.

Based on the thread, I went ahead and bought this card. However, after an uneventful install, I can't get Sage to see it.

I then installed the bundled software, and I user the DVDEncoder software to watch TV via the tuner, and record MPG2 without a problem. However, when I close this program, it crashes.

Help is appreciated.

WINME
Ath XP2200
256MB DDR RAM
Albatron KM266Pro
nVIDIA Geforce 4 MX440 8X DDR 64MB AGP
80 Gig
Sage 1.4 Trial
Yuan MPG600 PCI TV
WMP 9
DX9.0b

Hmm Take a look at the drivers to see if theirs any problems their though from the sounds of it the drivers are working. If the software that came with the card is causeing crashes on exit then at least the card is working but the crashing shows that something is not right(I know Duh! Stating the odvious). the fact that the software can at least use the card does show that the card is working so something else may be causeing the problems. Im not sure why sage isn't seeing it and yuan is i can't really say i don't know the software to that level.

You could try checking the irq the card is on to make sure their are no conflicts and possibly change the slot the card is in to see if that works. Try to find a slot that isn't sharing an irq with anything else and see if that solves the problem.

Looking up at your system specs though i do see another problem, the WINME OS. Windows ME was the worst 9xOS (Not meant as a shot at MS but it was even MS admitted that ) microsoft put out, If possible you should upgrade it to at least win2k. Or you could try useing 98se i know it's old but even se was better than me. Im using winxp myself and i have to say it's a much better os one of the most stable OS'es MS has come out with. Winme is very buggy but it should still be possible to get this working on it.

[Crazedz]

Just checking back roddym4 did you manage to get the problem with the card not being seen in sage worked out?

It would be nice to know if you did or not.

[roddym4]

Yes, I did get it working, though I am still getting random crashes which I believe may have something to do with my configuration.

Overall, the card worked well, though I have decided to give up on using my small FlexATX case and therefore decided to go with a PVR-250.

Now I still get a OLE32.DLL error when closing sage with the 250, which is weird. Still debugging.

Before changing gears, the YUAN worked flawlessly with Sage.

[Crazedz]

Ahh good to hear that you got the yuan to work and yeah it does work well in sage.

The problems your having with the pvr 250 is odd but then again ME isn't...... Well i have i think said enough about ME in my other post already. I can't help on the OLE32.DLL error sorry maybe Jeff or Dan or somebody else with more knowledge of DLL files can help out here. You could if nothing else try reinstalling ME to get back to a clean fresh install to get rid of corupt and damaged drivers and system files or optionally upgrade to a newer windows.

If you can get the problems solved then the yuan and pvr 250 would work very well in a dual tuner setup both work very well together in sage when the system isn't messed up of course :)

[gplasky]

A lot of times with an OLE32.dll error it's a recently installed program putting in an older version to specifically work with its app. I would start there and maybe look to see if it's the latest version or an older one. Not sure if ME has a SYstem restore feature but you may want to look at that route. Be careful with that route.

Gerry

[mikejaner]

ME introduced System Restore

mikejaner

[MattR]

Someone mentioned that the audio chip on this thing is made by Sony... could any of you find and post which one is being used? I'm interested in using this card under linux but I need to know which chipset it being used to determine whether or not it's supported.

Thanks!

Matt

[MattR]

Could someone who knows what audio chip this card uses please post the info? I can't find it anywhere!

[Crazedz]

Well i didn't look that closely to the board so i couldn't say offhand without pulling the card back out but.

I looked at the device manager for the properties of the Yuan card to see it's driver details. What i found was that all of the drivers except 2 were microsoft drivers. The 2 that weren't were conexent drivers but no sony driver or anything that said anything about sony.

I know that doesn't mean that the audio chip isn't sony but thats the best i can say at the moment. I'll try and pull the card out in the next few days and look at the audio chips (if i can find them) and let you know what i find out.

[MattR]

Thanks for trying! I really appreciate it!

[altano]

Hey how did you get the card working with sage TV?

I just installed sage tv, as I was using myHTPC before but am starting to get fed up with it.

When I go to live TV the video comes up and it plays for 2 seconds and then freezes along with Sage TV?

Did you encounter this? Also keep in mind i'm new to sage tv so be gentle :)

*EDIT* a restart fixed it.

Wow, a simple installation and everything works out of the box. Could sageTV be the best frontend ever or is it just me? :)

[dkardatzke]

Ah, but it's not just a front-end ...

[Crazedz]

Originally posted by altano
Hey how did you get the card working with sage TV?

I just installed sage tv, as I was using myHTPC before but am starting to get fed up with it.

When I go to live TV the video comes up and it plays for 2 seconds and then freezes along with Sage TV?

Did you encounter this? Also keep in mind i'm new to sage tv so be gentle :)

*EDIT* a restart fixed it.

Wow, a simple installation and everything works out of the box. Could sageTV be the best frontend ever or is it just me? :)

Hey glad you got it working and sorry i didn't respond before now but i had decided to use the time between betas to get the remodeling of my room taken care of so that it was out of the way before christmas and just finally got finished. I had to mention something i had heard from menards about sheetrock for ceilings and ended up making more work for myself. Next time i gotta remember to keep my big mouth shut instead so i don't end up putting my foot so far up in it.

[Llamas]

I can't find this card, anywhere. Has anyone seen it, or a clone, for sale recently?

[bboldschool]

I found their internet site... yuan.com.tw... has all the products listed and tech support...ect...

[bboldschool]

I saw this new low profile pci tuner on the provideo web site? will it work with sagetv or sagerecorder? Can anyone verify..it is
copy righted by covenant...I am just looking for a low profile pci solution and haven't been able to find the Yuan mpg 600...any thoughts..:confused:

[bboldschool]

I found the provideo card sold at solarpc.com for $119.99..I may have to give it a try..sounds like it will work..can someone else gives some advice....

[dcol]

I have this card and it works a whole lot better with Sage than it does with the bundled software. I have had nothing but trouble with the DVD encoder program. Crashes and lockups were common.

But I am concerned about someting. The Yuan DVD encoder program had the ability to set the MPEG bitrate. I don't seem to have any control using Sage.

Anyone know if Sage is even using the hardware encoding on the Yuan board and how to change the bitrates?

By the way forget about any support from Yuan. You are definetly on your own with this product.

Dan