I, like many others, have had various issues with my Hauppauge PVR-150MCE. These have ranged from the green screen, to poor picture quality, stuttering or no picture whatsoever. Vista Ultimate 64-bit, BTW

I believe I've stabilized this almost completely, so here's what I did to get where I'm at:

Green Screen:

• Install the frame buffer hotfix from MS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943195/en-us 

Poor Picture Quality:

• Use the Hauppauge-supplied drivers: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_mce.html
  (note that I unzipped this and perfomed an "update driver" from the device manager)
• Install the Hauppauge Tweaker: http://www.cask-of-amontillado.com/pvr_tweak.html
  This can be used "realtime" with VMC in window mode to get it to your liking. Need to be run as administrator to take effect.

Stuttering A/V & Loss of Picture/Signal

This was my latest discovery. I had found that most times, when I restarted my machine, there would be either no signal from the Hauppauge card, or violent stuttering making it unwatchable. This was not a playback issue as it would record that was as well. It was usually cured by a full shutdown, but even then, it would occur and sometimes 2-3 full shutdowns would be required to get it back to smooth playback.

While poking around in the BIOS (needed to enable S3 sleep capability) I noticed something. I'm using the onboard video of my MoBo (Radeon X1250). There was a setting in the BIOS to initialize VGA in a specific order, and it was set to initialize a PCI VGA card first, then the onboard VGA. I changed this and let it restart.

I'm happy to report that after several restarts the Hauppauge video continues to playback normally, something it was unable to do since I installed it. I can only guess that it's an initialization timing issue, as it was more like to have worked on a full shut-down vs. a restart. Check your settings to ensure that the BIOS is initializing the correct VGA controller in the correct order.

4+MB Memory

Finally, I am aware of the 4MB issue with the Hauppauge drivers. I have dedicated 1GB to the onboard memnory which seems to have at least tricked the OS or the tuner card into thinking I only have 3 MB. So far this has not appeared to be problematic to my setup.

Other

Some of this will work for other tuners... the HVR-1600 for example needed the greenscree hotfix and suffers from the same 4MB issue. I can only assume that it may also need the VGA initialization setting as well.

I'm very happy with the performance of the card at this time. If you have other things that have worked for you, post here.

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Vista Ultimate 32-bit SP1
Asus M2A-VM HDMI
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (65W)
500GB SATA HDD; 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800 SDRAM
nMEDIAPC HTPC 500BAR
Samsung 20X DVD±R
HD HomeRun; nVidia DualTV
Linksys DMA2100; WRT600N Router
ZALMAN CNPS 8700 NT

ACraigL:

4+MB Memory

Finally, I am aware of the 4MB issue with the Hauppauge drivers. I have dedicated 1GB to the onboard memnory which seems to have at least tricked the OS or the tuner card into thinking I only have 3 MB. So far this has not appeared to be problematic to my setup.

Is this the issue where if you have more then 4GB of ram the playback becomes choppy?  I had this problem and Hauppauge told me to remove my ram in order to bring it below 3GB.  It works fine but I was running windows 64-bit and using 6GB of ram for a reason and I would like to go back to it.  I have done all your other steps, but I guess I don't understand how you dedicated the ram.  Did you change the OS and Programs allocation to 3GB for programs 1GB for OS or was it something else?

Thank you for this post it has been very helpful.

Chris

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Vista Ultimate 64-bit
GIGABYTE P35-DS3R
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
750GB SATA HDD
3 GB DDR2 SDRAM (Hoping to make it 6GB again)
LITE-ON DVD±R with Lightscribe
HD HomeRun; Hauppauge PRV-150MCE
Apple Airport Extreme