A review on the Hauppauge HD PVR and how I get my movies off a Sky+ HD box, edit out the bits I don’t need and wrap the recording in an MKV container to play on my Mac Mini HTPC using XBMC.
This post follows on from my previous two posts on building a HTPC and backing up Sky+ HD programmes, in HD.
The Good
- Recording quality seems good, both audio and video
- The Bundled Total Media Extreme (TME) software by ArcSoft is easy to use and works OK
The Bad
- Recordings have to be made in real-time since the Sky box decodes the recording during playback
- No software bundled for the Mac. Try HDPVRCapture which seems to work OK. I only tried the demo version
- The M2TS and TS files generated from TME sometimes report incorrect length which causes me issues
My Setup/Process
- Sky+ HD box with HDMI output into a HD Fury III device (to convert to component). Sky+ HD box optical out to HD PVR via a TosLink splitter
- HD PVR to a laptop via USB2
- Total Media Extreme software captures in M2TS, TS or MP4 containers. The MP4 version only supports 2 channel stereo whereas the others offer full Dolby Digital 5.1
- I edit the resulting file using TSPE – Transport Stream Packet Editor to get rid of any guff at the ends of the file. This does not require a re-encode so the process is pretty quick and there is no loss of quality
What Next?
Overall I’m pleased with this little box of magic. It allows me to get movies off my Sky box in HD and store them on my NAS to watch via the HTPC at my leisure.
It’s not quite that simple for me, however. The M2TS and TS files do not play very well using XBMC on my Mac Mini and are very ‘juddery’ with some A/V sync issues. To overcome this problem I have to repackage the HD PVR output into an MKV container which plays perfectly.
I searched the internet for quite a while tring to find some free software to accomplish this, and the following is what I came up with and works for me:
- Using ffmpeg, I strip the H.264 video and AC3 audio streams into 2 separate files
ffmpeg -i input.{m2ts} -vcodec copy out.{h264} -acodec copy out.{ac3} - Use mkvmerge to re-mux the two streams into an MKV container
The whole M2TS -> MKV process takes about 15 minutes to complete using this method, but allows me to play the resulting file without any glitches.
To Conclude
The Hauppauge HD PVR does a great job at what I want it to do. I can finally liberate the movies that were imprisoned within my Sky box and let them live a life of freedom in my HTPC. Overall, I’m pleased.
Sounds an interesting setup. How is the process going a few months on?
Have been able to automate/reduce any of the manual steps?
Do you know if HD quality is still retained if you use the Copy function to playback any recorded files?
Cheers
Hi Scott
Not at the moment, but I made a few batch files to do the ffmpeg conversion parts. I did have a problem with a/v sync but that seemed to be a problem with the firmware of the Hauppauge box and when I downgraded this, it resolved!
The quality using the Copy function should be as good as when it was recorded onto the Sky box. The Hauppauge box will obviously compress it using H.264 so there will be a bit of quality lost at this point I guess, but whether you can tell or not is another matter. When you set the quality high, it still looks just as good as it did on the Sky box, so I’m happy with that.
Hope that helps a bit :-/
Thanks a lot for the article! Pretty much the only clear explanation that I’ve found online after several investigations. Bookmarked for when I receive my orders
One question I’d have though is – do you need HD Fury 3 or is 2 enough? Am I right that that 3 supports 5.1 sound and 2 doesn’t?
Thanks in advance, if you reply!
Hi Andris
Thanks – glad you found it useful!
I think you are correct in that the 3 supports 5.1 and the 2 only stereo. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I went for the Fury 3 over the 2… but it was a while ago now!!
Good luck with your setup. Shout up if you have any questions and I’ll try to help. I still use this setup today, it works well.