[mythtv-users] Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 bitrate settings

[Rod Smith]

Hi,

I recently added a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 MPEG-2 video encoder to my MythTV 
system. It's been working acceptably for the most part, although it's got a 
few glitches. One is that the MythTV bitrate setting seems to have no effect; 
I get recordings of roughly 3GB per hour no matter what values I specify in 
MythTV. (An AVerMedia AVerTV M150-D MPEG-2 card responds correctly to the 
bitrate settings, so I know I'm setting them correctly.) Of course, I can 
transcode recordings to smaller sizes for medium- and long-term storage if I 
like, but I'd prefer to be able to adjust this value at recording time, and 
also set it to higher values on occasion.

I've checked the pvrusb2 mailing list archive 
(http://www.isely.net/pipermail/pvrusb2/), and there was mention of this 
problem in the July 2006 archive:

http://www.isely.net/pipermail/pvrusb2/2006-July/000930.html

This post mentions the "new MPEG APIs," about which I know nothing. So in 
short, is there any way to get MythTV to set the bitrate on this hardware? 
Would support for these "new MPEG APIs" be coming any time soon? (I'm 
currently running the MythTV 0.20 binaries that ship with Ubuntu 6.10, on a 
locally-compiled 2.6.20 kernel and its pvrusb2 driver.)

Thanks for any information.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com