Hauppauge Win TV PVR
See it at Amazon.co.uk for £148.55Average Customer Rating
(3.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(1 out of 5)I wish I could award zero
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.
(3 out of 5)Don't Bother
I bought the usb version of this product for about the same price, I purely bought it to put all my VHS tapes on to CD VCD format but i was very dissapointed with the product, Don't get me wrong Hauppage TV cards are still brill the only thing wrong with this one was the recording software TV quality on this was excellant but when it came to recording it was poor. I recorded a film from a video tape about 40mins to test it out the initial VCD mpeg (before converting) came out really good sound & vision both in sync after it was converted to the actual VCD format to put on to CD as a VCD the last 15mins were out of sync. no matter what film i recorded and you can't even correct it because the initial mpeg is perfect. This product should have been singing & dancing for the price they charged but it was'nt for me.
P.S if you have bought this product i hope you have better luck then i did.
(5 out of 5)Almost as good as a TiVo
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.
(2 out of 5)What a downer !!
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.
(2 out of 5)Not worth the money
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,