Home > Consumer Reviews > Hauppauge -WinTV-PVR-250 TV Tuner/Personal Video Recorder

This is probably the best quality tv card you can buy for the money. Picture is clear and crisp with no dropped frames, and is much better than previous ATI and Hauppauge tuner cards that I have used.

The included Hauppauge software is crap, and their software has always been crap since when I first used it 7 years ago (Its the SAME application!). Its buggy and slow and has a very non-intuitive interface. Be sure to grab Snapstream BeyondTV, SageTV, MythTV or basically ANYTHING else and you will be pleasantly surprised by the difference.

Performance-wise this card is much better than the cheaper TV cards that do not include a MPEG encoder. Using an ATI TV Wonder I would routinely get 30-50% CPU usage when recording programs at fair quality on my 1.3Ghz CPU. The PVR 250 uses less than 5% CPU while recording at much higher quality.

Don't be fooled into buying the more expensive PVR-350. The only difference is the included MPEG decoder/tv-out on the 350. Its sounds like a good idea but unfortunately the decoder really only works with Hauppauge's software (and maybe SageTV) leaving you locked into using their crappy software. Besides the decoding process only uses 30-40% CPU for me and since the encoding uses basically no CPU it does not cause dropped frames while doing PVR decoding/encoding timeshifting activites.

The included remote (gray version) is "adequate" and contains most of the needed buttons. A plus is that is also works with the other PVR applications I have tried: BeyondTV and SageTV include native support for it. Unfortunately the range is really short and I can't get it to work more than about 7 ft away from the receiver, but it is better than nothing.

Bottom line: If you're building a serious Home Theater PC you should consider this card. Even though it costs more than double the cheapest tv card you could find, the quality and performance more than make up for the cost.
On the other hand if you're just planning on watching TV on your computer or digitizing some old VHS tapes you have lying around, this card is probably overkill as you won't benefit as much from the hardware MPEG encoder and there are cards out there that have better software packages and remotes for less money.

I bought this card mainly to transfer the contents of some old VHS video tapes to DVD. It did not take much work getting the card installed and running but the software has some glitches. It is intuitive and easy to use but sometimes for some unknown reason it will freeze up. This is easily recified by doing the old Ctrl-Alt-Delete routine to end the program but it is annoying. The program will freeze up and need to be restarted at least twice an hour. You cannot use any other software to interface with this card. I tried 3 different video editing programs with no success before I went to the manufacturer's website. They have a section on there where they tell you that the card will only work with the software that came with it. Even the slimmed down Ulead Movie Factory Toolkit that came in the software package cannot interface with the card directly. That was a little disappointing. The WinTV software does work and I am satisfied with the quality of video that I am able to capture and save with it and the card. Hence my rating of 4 stars.

There is one other strange issue that I have had. I'm not sure if it is the card or a coincidence but you might want to watch out for this. My husband has several video games installed on the machine. Shortly after we installed this capture card, a few of those games stopped working properly. The games would run and we could hear sound but the graphics would not display. No amount of tinkering, reinstalling etc could fix the problem.

Ok, I bought this used off of ebay, so I didn't pay the retail price, so anything negative I say about the card might be more of an issue if I'd paid retail for it.

The drivers for the PVR-250 have issues. If you have any kind of software DVD decoder on your system, such as PowerDVD or WinDVD, the PVR software doesn't play nice with them (the CPU usage jumps to 100% and the computer stops responding) -- you have to uninstall everything, then install updated drivers that work better with the DVD player. I ended up having a lot of software conflicts and decided just to wipe my hard drive and reinstall XP. That being said, everything works fine now :) but if you're not very techno-savvy and don't have a lot of patience, you might take this back to the store.

Now that those caveats are out of the way -- I love this card. The recordings it makes are high quality, you can select the quality/compression level you want to use, you can even do lower-bitrate (ca 1.4Mb/s) MPEG-1 captures with DVD-compliant audio (48KHz) and put 6 hours on a rewritable DVD. The higher-quality full-res MPEG-2 captures are also very good, which come in handy for recording stuff I want to keep. I primarily bought this card for time-shifting stuff, though.

The timer recording software is SUPERB. If you set the WinTV app to mute the volume while it's recording, it records your programs very unobtrusively. I haven't tried the TitanTV scheduling yet, but it's supposed to be integrated -- point, click, record.

My only real complaint about the recordings this card and the software make is that the MPEG files have to be remultiplexed for VCD/SVCD before they're burnable. It adds an extra minute or two to the burning process. In the grand scheme of things, this ain't a big deal, but it is worth mentioning.

--UPDATE: SIX WEEKS AFTER ORIGINAL REVIEW -- after owning this card for about six weeks, I have to recommend getting a third-party software solution instead of using Hauppauge's software. I had a lot of crashes using WinTV's software -- including programs I really wanted recorded. I now use Frey Technology's Sage Recorder, it's a no-frills, inexpensive Java-based PVR software package. Highly recommended, works great with the PVR-250.

I tried several competitive products for video capture - Dazzle, Adaptec, Pinnacle, and Belkin Videobus II (USB). Even though the Belkin Videobus was the easiest to set up, the WinTV PVR 250 was a very close second and has the best video quality I've seen! I'm using the device mostly for analog camcorder capture and VCD/DVD burning. The software is a little challenging to use, but the results are hard to match!!! A very reliable product. I'm looking forward to actually using the TV portion of the package soon, but I'm having too much fun converting my old analog camcorder tapes to digital!

I have been running the PVR-250 under Red Hat Linux for a while now, and using the Open Source MythTV application I have been able to record television shows, scheduling and watching them while at home, or on the road via MythTV's web interfaces.

The quality is quite amazing for the price, there are occasional minor artifacts in the resulting movies, but they are minor and hardly noticable when recording at the highest quality.

I have not used this card in Windows, but I would assume the quality is just as good under that operating system. I recommend this card to anyone who is interested in building their own PVR (Personal Video Recorder) system under Linux.