I currently have a Hauppauge PVR 150 in my VMC setup. Its nearly 3 years old now and I am thinking of updating it to a newer generation of card (if its worth it).

So, community, what cards do you use ? What I really am interested in is picture quality, ease of installation and, availability here in SA. Price is not really an issue.

Thoughts ?

I'd be interested to hear other opinions, but I don't think you are going to see any benefits.

Doesn't look like I am going to see any replies, let alone benefits

i also use the PVR 150 and the only reason i would upgrade my card is to get the benefit of recording another channel whilst watching the current channel..
in terms of picture quality, ain't nothing gonna affect that except your graphics card itself... in my opinion at least...
Enjoy!

I wonder what the difference between the svideo out on the UEC HD PVR and the Composite video....
Which Hauppauges have SVideo In?

Ok so instead of looking for a new card I have spent some hours browsing for tweaks and setups for my PVR 150 card.
I found the usual settings for turning down/off the temporal and spatial filters but I had already done these.

Then I found someting new : These registry settings that turn on the comb filter (not entirely sure what this is ) that by default
is turned off on the hauppauge 150. It is turned off due to the introduction of dot crawl on the picture.

Anyway I added this and found it greatly enhanced my picture, to the extent that is is comparable to that if I plug my DSTV
decoder directly into the TV, which was my 'holy grail' of TV tuner setup.

I do notice the dot crawl effect on edges of static logos (especially if they are red) but its very minor and IMO does not detract from the picture.

So, here are the settings :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\hcwPP2\DriverData]
"HcwMakoReg_SrcCombCfg_AND"=dword:00FFFFFF
"HcwMakoReg_SrcCombCfg_OR"=dword:20000000
"HcwMakoReg_CombCtl_OR"=dword:001F0000
"HcwMakoReg_CombCtl_AND"=dword:FF00FFFF
"HcwPALCombFix"=dword:00

I would be interested to know what you other hauppauge users think of these, so give them a bash. One may always deleted
the registry settings if you don't like it.

The link I got them from is here

http://www.shspvr.com/smf/index.php?topic=9170.0