Hauppauge 1187 WinTV-HVR-1250 Hybird PCI-Ex1 TV Tuner 1187

I was able to get this to work on my Comcast service (no cable box, non-premium, QAM channels) on Windows Media Center, Windows 7 PC, with a bit of work. It was not completely the devices fault, though it may have bit of a weak tuner in pulling in the signal. I found that even though my Sony HDTV could see the QAM signals, the 1250 could not.

It turned out that I had to remove the distribution amplifier and be sure that all the coax cables were as short and well made as possible.

The symptom that the 1250 gives when it doesn't receive analog or QAM signals is that the "tuners" are not found. Initially it found the analog tuner since Comcast still has a few analog channels, but no QAM tuner showed up when Media Center was being set up. Sometimes the Analog tuner didn't show up when I tried a rescan.

However, Once I got the distribution amps out of the way, reduced the number of splitters, and made the coax cables as short as possible the QAM and Analog tuners showed up consistently in Media Center setup and the system found over 100 QAM channels.

The other gotcha is that the 1250 doesn't show all the channels it detects (so they don't show up in the Media Center Guide). It only shows you what it thinks are the "unscrambled" channels. However, even though the card thinks it is a scrambled channel, I found that if I looked at each channel, some of them would be decoded. I could then check the channel to be included in the active channel list. In the end I went from the setup saying I only had 35 channels to having nearly 100 QAM stations.

So now I have all the non-premium stations visible.

The remaining challenge is with Windows 7 which doesn't give me guide information on most of the channels. This is typical with QAM, but other systems seem to be able to let you force a network designation on a channel so the schedule downloads. So far, I can only do this if there is already a channel shown in the guide (I can assign and exsiting schedule to other channels). If the system was not expecting a network, you apparently can't assign it to a station. For example, I get QAM Style, but that was not in the original list of channels Windows 7 was expecting (based on my zip input and cable company lineup choice). So, there does not seem to be a way to get the guide to go ahead and pull down the Style channel programs in the guide. I see I'm way off topic, but the reason you buy these cards is to have a DVR setup and I wanted to relay some of my experiences in setting this up.

This TV Tuner Card works well once you download the new drivers, etc. from the website. As I use it primarily for putting old VHS tapes to my hard drive to burn to DVD, I was a little frustrated at the lack of instructions as to how to set the Tuner Card up. That seems to be a common problem with most electronic items these days though as this is not the first product I have purchased with less than satisfactory documentation. Once I got it all figured out after much research on the internet, it works great. I would have given it 4, maybe even 5 stars if the instructions had been better.

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does what it's supposed to do. needs enormous processor power for hd.

included software did not work, i had to download their beta software to get going. all very confusing, took a while to realize that the software was the problem.

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Worked out of the box with Ubuntu 12.04 and Kaffeine. Also this is a digital only card, this makes the default directory "/dev/dvb" Not "/dev/video". Works flawless in Kaffeine.

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Very easy install, only had to put the divice in the right slot and it worked just fine in windows media center on a windows 7 x64 box. can't think of anything that has installed easier. didn't even need the driver disk since windows found the driver for me as soon as it was booted up.

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