"Plextor ConvertX and SageTV" by Troy H. Cheek on Mar 03, 2008
As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, I upgraded my motherboard and found that my old PCI-based TV tuner card no longer worked. I'm not sure quite what the problem was. Looking back, I can't remember if I ever removed the TV card while I was trying to troubleshoot the old motherboard, so it may be possible that the card had died and that was what was keeping the motherboard from working. I hope that's not the case. That would make me feel stupid.
Even though I seldom watch live TV and hardly ever record anything anymore, relying instead on a huge DVD library, free downloads, and the occasional loan from a friend, the thought of being without a TV tuner card altogether somehow seemed unbearable. Since my local computer store carried exactly one (1) TV card - a PCI-based unit of about the same vintage as my old one - I decided to search online. I began by searching for PCI cards, but my new motherboard only had two PCI slots. Not that I could think of anything else I'd like to stick in those slots, mind you, what with motherboards implementing so much onboard nowadays, but I wondered if I needed to keep those PCI slots free anyway just in case. Also, I wondered if anything better was available. PCI is pretty old technology. While I was gazing at the motherboard, I noticed a short slot just below the PCI Express slot. It seemed that this slot was also a PCI Express, though it was an x1 as opposed to the x16 that my video card was using.
A quick search brought me to a couple of articles which mentioned that the x1 slot hadn't really caught on except in the niche market of TV tuner cards. No more calls, please! We have a winner! Except that I wasn't too happy with the selection of PCI Express x1 cards I could find. There were a lot of digital tuners, but my cable system still gives me nothing but analog. Most of them seemed to use software video encoders. My old card was supposed to have a hardware encoder, or at least I thought it should based on the blurb on the box, but it turned out that it also used a software encoder. Hardware video encoders have specialized hardware (duh!) that do all the heavy lifting when it comes to video compression. Software encoders use the CPU which means they either bogs down other programs or other programs bog them down. This translates into a slow, lagging computer or less than stellar video quality.
The other problem was that all the PCI Express x1 TV capture cards I saw wanted Windows XP SP2 or Media Center Edition or even Vista. I was running Windows 2000 SP4 (heavily modified). I wasn't going to upgrade my operating system just to run a new TV capture card!
Enter Plextor's ConvertX PX-TV402U with TV tuner. Plextor has been around for a while, so I hope they can handle the Cheek.org Link of Death. Here lately, I no more than link to some fine company than I get an email saying the link doesn't work, or the email asked why I linked to a company that just went bankrupt. You also don't want me deciding to read your favorite monthly comic book.
"The Plextor ConvertX PVR model PX-TV402U is the ultimate personal video recorder for the PC." Since more PVRs came out since Plextor made that claim, including some by Plextor itself, I think it has been proven false. Marketing malarky aside, this little baby includes a hardware decoder which not only handles the standard MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 but is also Divx certified. Furthermore, feedback about the item screamed not to buy it because it wouldn't work with Windows Vista, only 2000 or XP. It used the USB 2.0 interface so I didn't have to worry about which motherboard slot it went in. While the TV402U still listed for $200, I found at one place with instant and mail in rebates which brought the final purchase price down to $50. I placed my order.
There are much better reviews of the TV402U available online than anything I could write, so I won't go into all the details here. Let's just say that I'm well aware that this is old technology which came out back around the end of 2004. But reviews back then were positive, and as I get older I find that I prefer tried and tested over bleeding edge technology. Besides, if the purchase turned out to be a learning experience, at least I was only out 50 bucks.
Installation was a breeze or at least a breeze for me. I'm used to automatic installation programs refusing to run. I manually installed the drivers, plugged in the device, and saw it appear in the Device Manager. With the included software (WinDVR 5, by the way, but don't even bother trying to use it), I was watching TV in no time. Well, I was watching B/W TV in no time. Live TV had no color. While recording, I had no picture at all. Recordings viewed later were fine, so it was just a display problem. This was not totally unexpected, as there appears to be some kind of law that says that any software included with a TV tuner device must be crap.
I found and installed several free or trial software packages: PVR, DVR, Digital VCR, "turn your computer into a free TiVO for just $100," etc. I finally settled on SageTV. It was the one whose Electronic Program Guide (EPG) actually worked the first time I tried it (and didn't charge a monthly fee). It was the one with the most troubleshooting tips in the forums. It was the one that was still being developed. It was the one that seemed most configurable. It was the one that ran as a service so if the user interface crashed my programs would still record. It was the one whose user interface didn't crash the first time I tried to record something.
The only thing I didn't like about SageTV was that the included video decoders weren't very good. See reference to "crap" law above. Oh, they worked. I had color and movement and everything. It was just that the quality of what I was watching was pretty low. The TV402U was sending it good data and SageTV was storing it properly - I could tell because replays with VLC media player were beautiful - but replaying within SageTV was almost painful. Besides, replaying quit altogether if I turned on my second monitor. This was a deal breaker, because I often put video over there while I perform my usual tasks on the main one. Both these problems seemed to be caused by the video decoders.
A quick search of the SageTV forums suggested nVidia's PureVideo MPEG-2 decoder to go with my nVidia 8600GT video card. This offloaded most of the decoding headache onto the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) of said video card. The PureVideo trial version output was better than SageTV's native decoder, but not as good as VLC. Also, I couldn't seem to find the options and settings that people in the forums kept telling me I should see if I had it installed correctly. I rebooted to see if maybe that would help.
As I mentioned last week, that was the last time that particular Windows 2000 install ever worked. I had to re-install Windows 2000 just to get a working system. I soon bit the bullet and installed Windows XP Professional. Yes, I know that I purchased XP at about the same time as Microsoft announced that it would soon no longer be sold. I use that as a sign that they finally have all the bugs out.
SageTV with EPG is, well, wonderful. Plextor's pack-in software (which wasn't even made by Plextor) gives barely more functionality than your average VCR. SageTV starts at the best features TiVO or a similar device has to offer and goes up from there. Everything is configurable, though even the default user interface is quite fine by me. I know how easy it is to install a new harddrive into my PC if I need more recording space. I've already defined a dozen favorites and have a few hours of new television waiting for me every night when I come home from work and just need to unwind from a full day of not strangling all the people who deserve it. I'm catching up on all the episodes of Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs that I missed whenever my old TV card and software simply decided not to work on a particular day.
I haven't tried the Intelligent Recording option just yet. If I understand properly, this option will look at my favorites and shows I've watched live and use them to forecast what I might like to watch in the future. If something interesting shows up and the tuner is not going to be tied up recording a favorite, it will record a new show just in case. I can watch it later if I want then flag it as something I'd like or not like to see again. I'm not using it yet because I only have a few days of programming history and I don't want SageTV to make snap judgements and decide that I like nothing but Hungarian mud wrestling or something. I spent one weekend at a friend's house and he accused me of convincing his TiVO that he was a geriatric pedophile vegetarian.
The PureVideo MPEG-2 video decoder installed just fine once I tried it again, but it had no better output and no more options than it showed under 2000. At least it didn't bork my new install. No problem, as the SageTV forums pointed me to several add-ons, one of which allowed me to call external programs and pass them the filenames of the video files I was trying to view. Once I determined that VLC needed a "-q" switch to operate in this manner, I was watching video like nobody's business.
I was actually looking for codecs (coders and decoders) for another project when I stumbled across FFDSHOW, which is a free software project which tries to do what PureVideo does, but for every video file format in the world. It's all software, but if you're watching a full screen video, you can't do a lot of multitasking anyway. I had to make FFDSHOW my default codec for MPEG-2 using DECCHECK, then set SageTV to use the default (since FFDSHOW didn't show up as an option), and suddenly I was viewing output from within SageTV that was within a hair of the quality I had grown used to seeing with VLC. More importantly, I was able to access the options and tweak it to my heart's content. Before long, I was adjusting brightness and contrast on the fly while smoothing the jaggies, automatically adjusting for CPU load. At least, that's what I think I'm doing. And while I was about to shell out $20 for the cheapest registered version of PureVideo, FFDSHOW is free.
I did have to pay for SageTV, though. The same day I cut the UPC code from the box the Plextor ConvertX came in and mailed off for my $80 rebate check, I shelled out $79.95 for the full registered version of SageTV 6. I'm sure that it's a complete and total coincidence that the rebate exactly covered the cost of the software needed to bring out its full potential.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Dirty Jobs marathon to watch.
