Home > Consumer Reviews > Hauppauge Win TV PVR

If you want to avoid splashing out for a standalone PVR machine such as the TiVo, then this may be what you need. Although the image is slightly blockly full-screen, it is clearer when you play back a recorded image, and the money you save probably makes it worth it. Although you cannot set it to automatically record a program by name, you can set it up to record at a specific time, and the included remote control makes this system preferable to those made by other manufacturers.

I bought this with high hopes of converting my VHS to VCD, I have been following the advice on the web site support, still no luck in getting any sound from the thing, the picture can be shaky, the radio doesn't work, again sound.
I was very nervous following their advice to edit the registry, with XP giving up all sorts of warnings, but I carried on, still no sound, wish I hadn't bothered buying it, over a month of frustration ,when building my new PC should have been a delight.

I bought the WinTV PVR 250 to replace my Pinnacle/Miro PCTV

Unfortunately, the hauppage software has caused XP to crash on numerous occassions.

There are sync problems video and audio together.

The capture picture quality is not as good as my old Pinnacle card - it's very blocky despite the hauppage being able to do MPEG2 DVD quality in hardware compression - the results look nothing like DVD - more like VCD on a bad day.

The card is 125 channel cable ready - but if you are using digital cable/sat you can only tune to what the set top box is watching which makes the PVR ability fairly pointless.

There are about a dozen different updates to install from their website including the bundled applications and utilities. By comparison Pinnacle have a single web installer/updater which is much easier.

On the whole,

I'll never criticise another Microsoft release again. . . Hauppauge have cornered the market in ... the triumph of marketing over substance. I started off with a Win TV PCI card that refused to work till I juggled it between slots in my old Dell (5 minutes to buy, 8 hours to get working), then lost the audio every time I tried to capture anything. With ill-deserved confidence I bought the PVR PCI on a new XP machine. Did it work ? No. In fact the driver disk as supplied won't work under XP. Another 8 hours... finally got it working. By which I mean MPEG capture is intermittently blocky and totally unsuitable for non-trivial use, the AVI capture blue screens my PC. On the plus side, burning the card will keep me warm through these long winter nights.

I bought mine in late 2001 when few TV recording cards were available for a reasonable price. It has done well since then and I have many good recordings at varying bit rates and quality.

However for todays market in 2004, it is out of date, even allowing for the software updates. There are two main problems now 1) The audio sync is poor, not terrible but noticeably bad when music is involved and you can see a drumstick coming down. For speech it is bearable. 2) The highest recording aspect ratio is 704 x 576 which is less then DVD at 720 x 576. This makes the production of DVDs from WinTV PVR recordings slower than it would otherwise be since re-encoding is necessary.

I would not buy one again owing to the above but feel I have got my moneysworth over three years. Now it is overpriced and subject to considerable competition from both Pinnacle, Leadtek, Avermedia and others.