Hauppauge PCTV 800i TV Tuner. PCTV HD PCI CARD INTERNAL WATCH & RECORD TV ON YOUR PC C-CARD. PCI -

First, Hauppauge bought Pinnacle's PCTV product line so this card and the Pinnacle PCTV 800i card are the same.

I am running 32-bit XP Pro. I don't have Media Center. I have tried 3 other TV tuners and this is the best I have found for my situation. In my opinion, the WinTV PVR software that comes with Hauppauge products is sub-standard. The TVCenter software that comes with the PCTV 800i card is better, but be sure to update to the latest release or you may be disappointed (updates are available at the PCTV Systems website, just use the activation code that came with the original software).

The TVCenter software occasionally hangs and if I am in full screen mode I have to punch the reset button to recover. In any case, the PC must be rebooted to get the TVCenter app working again. I believe this is because I don't have the Media Center edition of Windows XP. I found that replacing the PsisDecd.dll seems to fix the problem. You can find the patch by searching for PsisDecd.dll or dvbfix.

Time shifting works smoothly. Recording works great too. You can put your PC into hibernation and scheduled recordings will still be made, and you can have your PC go back into hibernation when the recording is done. There is a minor idiosyncrasy to be aware of. If you want to schedule a show to be recorded while your PC is running, be sure to have a PCTV application running (such as the recording tasks app). If you do not, then the scheduled recording will not be done. However, if you put your PC into hibernation and a scheduled recording is due to be made while the PC is in hibernation, you do not need to have a PCTV application running. The PC will wake up at the scheduled time, make the recording and go back into hibernation (or whatever you configure it to do when the recording is done).

The remote control works intermittently with the included TVCenter software. It sometimes gets stuck on one channel. You can restart the TVCenter app to get things working correctly again. Also, the channel up/down buttons seem to work backwards, up is down and vice versa! Still, it seems to work better than the others I tried.

The Electronic Program Guide works sometimes. It does not seem to get information for some of the channels that I am certain are providing the information (my other TV will display the information).

One other minor gripe is that the "Disable Screen Saver" option does not work. But I can manually turn off the screen saver when I want to watch TV. I can live with that.

The reception is good and the picture is good. On my ancient system (dual core 3.4 GHz Pentium D) there is about a 50% processor load when I'm watching TV.

Conclusion: the PCTV 800i hardware seems fine, the TVCenter software not so much. If it weren't for all the software glitches I would give them 5 stars. Perhaps if you use this with Media Center your experience will be better.