Home > Consumer Reviews > Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 PCI Personal Video Recorder with TV Tuner

I cannot recommend this product enough. I decided to buy it for two reasons; partly as a cheaper way of enjoying a SKY+ (Sky Hard disk Recorder and decoder)like service and also so I could archieve many old home movies.
While it isn't as convienient as the Sky+ service (obviously not intergrated with you digibox) it comes pretty close. One of the most useful services is its ability to pause live TV, I'd heard about this several times and I have to admitt it didn't sound that exciting...however using it from day to day it has become indispensible.
As for archiving my home movies, though it was a little time consuming I have now archieved all of them succesfully (on to DVD).....those tresured memories are safe!
I must also point out that because the card has both an mpeg encoder and decoder or board it uses very little in the way of system resources and of course it can all be outputed to your television via an s-video cable.
If I had one criticism (hence only 4 stars)it would be some of the software that comes with the card, though the WinTV software is certainly good (pausing and instant recording) the scheduling software (ie. setting your computer to record a programme in the future) is so tempremental as to be virtually useless. However thanks to 3rd Party Software (Frey Technologies - Sage Recorder) this is no longer a problem.
What can I say other than I can't imagine not having this card, it is versatile, powerful and reliable. Say goodbye to VHS without spending £500.

Once I'd installed the latest drivers, it worked perfectly.

I can encode from TV or VHS with no noticeable degradation in quality. The Ulead software supplied with it makes creating DVDs very easy, but it uses unfathomable amounts of disk space.

Get yourself a big hard disk to go with it.

Its not possible to say much more than has been said already. I agree with both the manufactures blurb and the previous review whole heartedly, the card is great. Apart from the scheduler problem one tiny thing id put right if i could is that theres no direct way of choosing a channel. Id like to be able to press 4 on the remote for example to select channel 4, but instead, i have to scroll through. That said though, i thoroughly recommend this card, more over its inputs and outputs compared to the competion ive seen.

I am very impressed with this piece of kit, in fact the only criticism I have so far is the minimal installation instructions. I have never even opened my PC before and certainly never installed any hardware; the lack of detailed instructions left me slightly nervous. HOWEVER, installation was a piece of cake, the minimal instructions were all that was required, the software loaded without error and the card now works perfectly. It was up and running within half an hour of opening the box.

The picture quality is very good, and when playing videos through the scart lead is excellent. Record quality is superb but very memory hungry. I am now going to back up all those fragile old videos onto DVD and give them a new lease of life, a real bonus.

I would highly recommend this product to anyone.

Great product, I have it installed in my small factor PC connected directly to the TV through Scart, watching, recording, scheduling and playing back all my TV programs.

This has saved me a fortune, as I was about to invest in Sky+, now for a fraction of a cost I have a full PC + Sky+ system with unlimited disk space..........!