I found a fix! PVR 150.

I finally found the fix I was looking for. I own a Hauppauge PVR 150 tuner card that I use with Windows Media Center. This is not a new card by any means but it does get the job done for all of my SD television viewing and recording. 

Its the second card that I have owned, the first being an ATI, many many years ago. The 150 worked well under Vista (32bit) media center, but I began to struggle with some some software issues when I moved to Windows 7. Blocking/pixelating of live signals and choppy system audio became an issue. Rebooting helped, and cold booting usually fixed the problem. Drivers were reinstalled, several times.

I did finally find a fix. Apparently this card or card’s driver does not play well with more than four gigabytes of RAM. Here’s what to do:

1 - Pressed START 
2 - Typed: “msconfig” 
3 - Moved over to the “Boot” tab 
4 - Clicked “Advanced options…” 
5 - Checked off “Maximum memory” 
6 - Decreased memory from its full amount of 4096 to 4088 
7 - Clicked OK and accepted my changes & rebooted my computer 

If you’re running more than 4GB of RAM this isn’t much of a fix, because I wouldn’t want to give up more than 1GB of RAM; but in my case I only gave up about 8 MB, which is so minor I haven’t even seen a performance change, nor would there be one really. 

Somehow this tweaks the driver or card into thinking there is not a full four gigabytes of RAM and stops the blocking. It worked for me, but system to system it may vary.

I could blame who I could blame, but its not worth it, the card is not new, however, I do have some advice:

1. Get a well supported card. Which is hard to do these days, not many of the manufacturers support their cards for very long from what I have observed. The software that comes with these cards suck. The best I have seen is Windows Media Center. Sage TV might be alright, and if you want to screw around, there is always MythTV, which I do not recommend.

2. Don’t spend a million dollars on a card, unless this box is primarily a DVR or you have a camera system that requires it.

3. Hardware decoders. The PVR 150 uses software to do some or most of the work. You want hardware decoders to take the load off of your machine, and to prevent incompatibilities similar to what has been mentioned.

Credit: Tyler_K at NCIX Forums

(Source: forum.ncix.com)