Home > Consumer Reviews > Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 Personal Video Recorder PCI

Hi
The company sent me the one for vista rather xp as advertised here.
I phoned to complain and a helpful chap advised me just to download the xp drivers since its the same hardware used in both products.

It now all works really well, and since its the MCE version I now have an MCE remote control and all the bits required for when I upgrade to Vista.
Recording from SKY is excellent via S-Video and audio cable. I tried a cheap TV card before picking this one and it does not compare.

Sound from this card is also great. I have started watching the music channels again;)

I would have liked the card to be cheaper since they have models with freeview tuners built in for not a lot more. I needed it just for SKY and couldnt track it down any cheaper.

So although I was initially miffed all is now well, and the staff answered quickly when I called and were very good technically.

reccomended.

There appears to be a lot of confusion about this product, as various places on the net are selling versions without the full contents and no-where seems to be 100% clear about what is included.
I just spoke to someone at Hauppauge who confirmed to me that this item should be the full version.
This is the Non-MCE version. As such, it is designed for normal XP and, more importantly, includes an "IR Blaster". This is what will enables you to send IR signals to your Sky box so that the PC can change to the channel you want to record. To my knowledge, no other hauppauge card comes bundled with the IR Blaster - yes, even the more expensive cards.
Note that the IR blaster WILL NOT work with NTL or other forms of Cable TV. This is NOT Hauppuage's fault, the set-top boxes used by NTL etc use a different IR standard specifically to make this product NOT work out of the box. They want to push their Sky+ like service and dont want you to be able to easily do it for 50 quid. In order to change channel with NTL you will need a different IR device such as a "Red Rat". The Red Rat would probably not work with the bundled Hauppauge WinTV software though I don't think, but who wants to use that anyway? Use SageTV or BeyondTV instead...

Because this device does hardware video encoding, as long as the PC you want to use can decode video OK (ie can you play a DVD on it?) then your PC should be powerful enough to let you watch one recorded show as you record another.

The PVR-150 is the defacto TV Tuner card for Standard Definition (SD). I have never heard of PVR software that doesn't support it. In fact, Beyond TV still recommend this as a great card to use for their software.

So.. for £50 odd you can turn a spare PC and regular sky into a Sky+ box on steroids. Does your Sky+ box allow you to burn recorded shows to DVD? No, I didn't think so... Need more space for recordings? With a PC, just add more disks, with Sky+ you would have to invalidate your warranty. Add some decent PVR software like Beyond TV (Not included) to let you do *really* flash stuff like connect over the net to set shows to record or stream sky to your mobile phone / laptop over the internet.