Home > Consumer Reviews > Hauppauge WinTV HVR4000 - True HD TV tuner - Quad mode (Analogue, Digital, Satellite both DVB-S and HD DVB-S2)

I've been dealing with Hauppauge products now for about 10 years - both as an end user and as a system integrator. The one thing that always characterises their products is that the hardware is almost always good, the drivers and application level software is initially always very poor and sloppy, but slowly improves via software updates as a product matures. In other words they have an endemic Quality Assurance (QA) problem in their software department. For some products the software improves via periodic updates to the point where the overall ensemble of a product is very usable, other times they issue a few updates to get the thing fairly usable, and then just abandon it and move the focus on to new models. I guess in such a fast moving market as PC video, where being the first to market with the latest and greatest innovation is clearly important, that's what you have to do if you want to stay in business.

This product follows the usual Hauppauge pattern. On my Windows XP SP2 system (1GB RAM 2.4Ghz P4 processor) it installed fine (but make sure you get WinTV7 CD.Exe from Hauppauge's website with the latest drivers, don't use anything earlier). During the install, loads of messages flash across the screen and can't be read - were they important? Well, possibly not: But then, why show them?

The card worked as soon as I diverted the dish lead from my (now ceased) 2nd Sky box to it. The auto tune routine worked very well and found over 100 channels (including radio channels).

I can now get all the Freesat channels and they look great! BBC News24, Film 4 all look wonderful. Of course I can't get any of the premium (pay) Sky channels because this card contains no decrypter for pay channels and never will. Also, what I receive is not yet HD (since there is only one Freesat channel doing actual HD as yet, or so I understand), but most are 16:9 and I get excellent capture quality - easily as good as I get on a SKY+ box. But of course, with this product you end up with the programme as a file on your PC. That means you can keep it forever, at original quality - burn it off to DVD or whatever you want. This is far better than Sky's offer, which prevents digital copying (even of free to air stuff!) and makes you copy it via analogue composite - in real time, which is hardly comparable to this.

The quality of video captured by this card is so good because you are capturing the actual digital video stream that is being broadcast, not something that has been turned into analogue video and then re-digitised. Previous generations of Hauppauge cards such as the PVR 250 and PVR 350 cards did a good enough job, but had quality limitations because they only had analogue (composite) video inputs. Using this newer product everything stays digital all the way through, thus quality loss is absolutely minimal - even after editing out ad breaks etc, see below.

One problem I initially had after installation with choppy audio was easily remedied by using info from the support pages of Hauppauge's website. Basically, in the WinTV configuration sheets you need to choose the 3rd party (unsupported) audio MPEG encoder: Don't use the default one, seems it doesn't work properly 8-). This info has been on Hauppauge's support site for some time, so why does the latest product installer still default to using the non-functional audio Codec? Another thing Hauppauge's software QA should have picked up. Perhaps they don't actually do QA on their software?

So, when I capture a file it is saved to hard disk as an MPEG transport stream (a .TS file) and I can then use a video editor that I already have (Womble Software's excellent MPEG Video Wizard) to edit out commercials and other stuff from the rubbish breaks, and then save the edited version as an MPEG Program Stream. This means I can keep the show forever and play it on any PC or stand alone DVD player I choose. The captured video works really nicely with my Archos mobile player, which allows me to watch videos on the move. The Womble editor works really well for me, but I'm sure there are many other MPEG video editors which will allow you to do this stuff equally well.

As ever, the WINTV7 application software that fronts the product is a bit flaky and hangs up and crashes if you stress it at all. But, it works okay for mainstream things, just don't expect speed or great robustness. Clicking too many things in quick succession seemingly causes it severe problems. It often responds very sluggishly (as all versions of WinTV always have), so click one thing at a time, be patient and it will be okay for you, with maybe just the odd crash or hang up 8-). I'm afraid that's expected behaviour with Hauppauge application level software - it's a tradition they seem to want to keep up!

Happy viewing.
Alan T

Good multi purpose TV / SAT card, possibly let down by it's software.
Have a few situation where sofware just sppear to freeze.

Would have been 5 start if not for software.

WinTV HVR4000 has been out for sometime and remains the top feature packed device in the Hauppauge range.

Make sure your sound and video device drivers are the most up todate and download the latest software - WinTV 7. You need PowerCinema to get the HD drivers and getting the latest version on CD is a must to get HD channels and to install on Vista.

I have yet to install any Hauppauge software that ran immediately and without problems. Download the hcwclean utility as you are very likely to need it at least once. You also need a different satellite channel list as the lastest one or any included does not list Freesat as an option.

WinTV 7 is the new application styled for use with mouse and keyboard. PowerCinema can be viewed from the back of the room with the supplied remote making it very similar to the experience when using a desktop box or hard disc recorder. I find WinTV easier to and faster to manage than PowerCinema which takes over the whole screen.

Set up has check boxes for Analogue, Terrestial DVB and Satellite. I also scanned FreeSat 28.0 and separately Astra 28.2 to get all the channels I want. Although FreeSat starts by only including a list of a few channels I have found more by scanning again and again.

For updates, rescanning, new channels are added at the end of the list. Channel re-order and finding channels is slow. You can't browse channels as all viewing is buffered to allow pause and resume which creates a delay of up to 30 seconds when compared to watching using WinTV 6 or another TV card.

In terms of picture quality the HVR4000, as the HVR3000 which I also have, is outstanding on a 1920x1200 24" screen. When using the same screen fed from a hard disc recorder on the HDMI cable (PC uses DVI) the image has more blocks and digital faults which appears as more grain.

From WinTV 7 selecting from Freeview and FreeSat is simply scrolling down a long list or typing in a few letters to filter the list. This way picking e.g. Film 4 on DVB-T or Film 4 or Fil 4+1 on DVB-S is equally quick. Under PowerCinema the chunky interface, separate pre-selection of terrestial or satellite and slow scroll makes for hard work.

In terms of recording you get .ts files which can be edited with using VideoReDo (a third party application downloaded as a free trial before you pay for it). VideoReDo allows head and tail and the removal of advertisements without changing the file type or compression. The resulting mpg file is smaller and has the same quality as the original recording. Building up a library or saving a set for the rest of the family to view is much easier than using the controls on a hard disc recorder although you may not want to leave your PC running when away on holiday, no less than the fact that the PC is likely to reboot (standard WinDoze updates if nothing else) and not run the applications.

If you are not particularly interested in HD (with only two channels so far on FreeSat to watch) then the HVR3000 is a little cheaper. By the time there are more channels in HD we might have HD on Freeview and none of the current cards will handle that change. PowerCinema is also useful for watching BlueRay discs.

Support from Hauppauge has been varied but after the same pattern of updating drivers, cleaning out the application and re-installing they usually come through. Sometimes a new release of the free to download sotfware is all that is needed.

The basic product is good, but software+installation+hardware is not as straight out of the box as it should be - that is not all down to Hauppauge. Support for Vista 64 and Vista 32 is now better than XP, where faults seen are slightly different with fixes promised in the next software release.

I still rate the product as good value and if looking to build another PC would want to include this card.

This is an excellent addition to my PVR, allowing me to record from Freesat on the computer.

Works well with MythTV - although you do need to do a bit of searches on how to do this, as it won't work out of the box.

Note that for the BBC HD, you do need to have a quickish processor (I'm running a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel), and the playback options configured to use two CPUs (apparently 3GHz is fast enough for 1 CPU).