Hauppauge 1183 WinTV HVR-1600 Internal PCI Dual TV Tuner/Video Recorder Media Center Kit

The installation instructions were abbreviated...a little too abbreviated. The drivers didn't install properly and I was afraid I had made a mistakein buying this card. I downloaded the newest software from the website, and in the process figured out what the problem was with the original install. Once I had that done I started to receive some channels, but not all. It was through a trial error process I was able to figure out that in order to receive all TV channels and FM radio I needed an antenna connected to all three inputs. It's not an easy trick because of the limited space between the connectors. It also makes the back of the PC a little messy. The instructions for the operation software were also quite brief and very vague, and that took some time to work through as well

But I eventually figured everything out and I'm glad I did. Using a P4 2.99 ghz and XP Pro SP 3 and an HP 2207h HD monitor the picture is as clear as it is on my large HDTV. I am very impressed. I've used the record function and it works very well, as does the screen shot feature. Now that it's up and working I think my wife could sit down and watch TV on it with little or no instruction from me, so that learning curve is very short.

Don't expect to stick this card in and be up and running in 5 minutes. And don't buy this card if you are a computer or a/v neophyte you'll be disappointed. But if you know your way around software installs and enjoy fiddling around with something like this and the satisfaction of getting it working it is does a VERY good job.

This was my first MythTV install, Mythbuntu 8.10, in a leftover P4 system. The HVR-1600 worked like a champ out of the box. The only thing I needed was an external channel changing script to control the IR Blaster for changing channels on my cable box.

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I bought this tuner to put in my Windows 7 computer. I have basic analog cable and this tuner is perfect for it. The install was easy, windows media center found the tuner right away. The tuner discovered all my cable channels. Now my computer is my DVR. It is amazing how flawless this works. It is a must have.

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I'm usin git right now. I'll tell you this; it took me around 15 minutes total to install and configure it with Windows Media Center 7. The picture quality is excellent, it picks up about all the channels our expensive HDTV can get (using the same type of antenna), and it just generally works great. Um, this works well with Windows 7 if you're wondering. I downloaded the latest driver from hauppauge's site (about 1.1 MB) and voila. Here're my system specs:

Core i7 920 @ 2.66 GHz

WD 640 GB Caviar Black

HD Radeon 4870X2

6 GB of tripple channel DDR3

Intel DX58SO Motherboard

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I am very pleased with the HVR-1600 Media Center Kit. I initially had trouble with the analog picture quality (Very grainy w/ bad color) and almost returned the card but decided to do a little checking around on google. I eventually found the answer to my problem. I had used the included Composite to S-Video adapter to feed the composite signal from my satellite box into the S-video port on the card and when setting up the card in media center I chose S-Video as the source (because I was feeding the composite signal into the S-Video port via the adapter). It turns out this was a mistake and the cause of my woes. I went back into media center and set up composite as the source and now the analog picture is excellent. I wonder how many others complaining of poor analog picture quality with this card have made the same mistake.