Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1600

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Terrific product works flawlessly for Vista!
Reviewer: Mark from Appleton, WI on Mar 10, 2007
274 out of 348 found this review helpful

After doing a bit of research, I found the HVR1600 and was anxious to try it in a new Windows Vista Media Center I was building. For one thing, it works absolutely flawlessly with Vista. Very easy to install, Media Center in Vista sees them and sets itup effortlessly. Go to Hauppauge's website to download the latest driver (the CD included had revision B, the website had revision C). If you're using Media Center, don't install the Hauppauge-supplied software. It's *nowhere* near as user-friendly androbust as Media Center. There's some conflicting info online about this card but let me reassure you-- this *is* a true dual tuner card -- both tuners can be used simultaneously. I have two of these in my Vista Media Center PC, thus I'm able to recordfour shows at once (2 HD shows off an antenna and 2 cable shows). With my Core 2 Duo E6600, 3 GB RAM and SATA II hard drive, recording four shows only tops out at 40% CPU utilization! FYI-- Media Center in Vista only lets you have two of each type of tuner, so two of these cards will let you record the most amount of shows you're allowed. The on-board MPEG-II hardware encoder (for the NTSC tuner) really keeps the workload off your CPU. Using my Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender works perfectly too.The ATSC tuner seems to pull down moderate signals pretty well. My antenna, when hooked up to my TV, would only register 69-79% signal in my area, but I've very rarely had any signal dropouts with these cards. This card plays well with others My onlyqualm is that the NTSC tuner seems very slightly dark in the picture, but Hauppauge cards have had this quirk for a while. It's nowhere near as dark as the PVR150 I used. I did have to exchange one of these cards because there was a slight squealing distortion in NTSC tuned audio, and I was hoping it wasn't interference inside my PC, but it was likely a defective card as a new one didn't have that problem. Everything's working perfectly for me now, and I've ditched both my dual-tuner TiVos!! One noteto some of the comments on here about needing a high-spec machine to use this. I don't think it's that you need a high-spec machine to record, as it essentially passes the program stream directly to the hard drive (it doesn't need an encoder like the NTSC tuner does). What you really probably need is a good video card with hardware decoding to play back HD smoothly. A good Nvidia card with hardware decoding acceleration ('PureVideo') works good, I find. Windows Vista comes with a good software decoder itself. If you have XP, you will need decoding software such as Nvidia's Purevideo DVD Decoder.

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Works well with vista
Review posted on Mar 19, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Works with Visa Media center very well.

Remote even works mostly, just a few buttons don't work like they are supposed to, but overall a decent working remote. Just have to run the remote program, download latest drivers for the remote and card online.

I only wish it had digital cable reception, but for a discount card it works well. The MPEG2 decoder on board is great, very little lag on the computer.

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it just worked -- with BeyondTV anyway
Review posted on Mar 14, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I plugged it in, installed the drivers, and ran through BeyondTV (third party dvr software) setup to add the card as an analog cable tuner, and stuff just worked as expected.

Picture quality is very good, channels change reasonably quick, and requires very little CPU when recording thanks to the hardware mpeg encoder (much better than the card it replaced, which required software encoding).

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