I don't write many reviews, but I thought I'd put in a good word for this product. This is an excellent tuner, especially for the price. I doubt you'll find a better tuner capable of HD at this price range. It handled a SD signal very well. While watching SD television, I could have several other programs running at the same time without a problem. The card handled a SD well enough that the CPU was free to do other things. At one point, just to put it to a test, I had a DVD playing on my television, a youtube video playing in my internet browser, and the tv playing. They all ran fine.HD was a slightly different story, but that's to be expected. As long as I was only watching the television, everything was fine, but I could forget doing a lot of multitasking. I could run other programs at the same time, but only if they weren't too demanding. My computer's over a year old though, and was hardly a high end supercomputer when I bought it (AMD 3400+ processor). I haven't tested it out myself, but if you've got a newer PC with a dual core, you should see much better performance.
A couple of warnings though. I would NOT get this as a substitute for a true HD television. Even on a very good monitor, the picture just isn't quite up to par with a decent HDTV. The same is true when it comes to recording. It does the job, but its a little crude compared to a DVR like, say, TiVo. There are other little shortcomings too, like a half second delay between the signal and the picture showing up on your screen. Not a problem for television, but it makes playing games nearly impossible. Don't plan on hooking up your console to this thing.
Also, plan on doing a little tweaking when you install it. This is not a plug and play device. I'm not an A/V expert, but I do have some experience installing PC hardware, and it took me a couple of hours to get the drivers and the settings straight. Plan on going to the company's website for drivers and troubleshooting guides. It got me through the install without too much aggravation.
These shortcomings are things you'll experience with nearly any TV tuner, unless you plan on spending a small fortune. They aren't due to flaws in the product. The technology just has some limitations at this point.
Overall, an excellent PC TV tuner. Even on a computer that was far from high end, it ran very well.
Cons: No HDMI input, Card is pretty wide may not fit in some narrower cases
After upgrading my PC to Vista Home Premium, I discovered that the tuner on my All-in-Wonder wasn't working in Media Center. With a bit of research, I quickly learned that ATI/AMD has no intention of providing Vista driver support for AIW's. Splendid.
After further research, I decided to give this card a try, and was not disappointed.
Based on my previous experience with the AIW, I was anticipating having to jump through hoops to get it working in Media Center. I was pleasantly surprised.
I popped the card in, booted up, downloaded the drivers from Hauppauge's website, and loaded Media Center. It immediately picked up both the analog and ATSC HD tuners.
The picture quality from my analog cable feed is highly satisfactory equal to if not better than my AIW's performance in XP MCE.
This card also features an independent tuner for over-the-air ATSC HD content up to 1080i. This is strictly for over-the-air digital HD content for which you will generally require an amplified antenna. It is not QAM enabled, so you cannot plug in a digital feed from your cable/satellite provider. There is, however, an S-Video port which you can connect to your set top box. This is useless though for HD content above 480p, which leads me to wonder why there is no HDMI port.
I was also very pleased to discover the included remote works flawlessly with Media Center.
Recommended? Absolutely.
Buy Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder Now
I build Media Center PCs as a hobby for the past 2 years and I've played with a fair share of tuners from Avermedia, Divico, Hauppauge, EMuzed, ATI, nVidia, etc. As I rebuilt my Sony XL-1 CE-EPC, I wanted to swap our the OEM card and an old ATI HDTV Wonder card I put in with something more stable than the OEM analog + HDTV wonder that also fit the XL1 chassis. After using the HVR-1600 for the past 6 months, I'm pleased to report that ATSC tuning/channel change is quite fast, it has good ATSC signal sensitivity and most importantly, stable while running Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center app. I do get a glitch on occasion switching between analog and digital channels with a MCE 'video error' message. I can't target the problem but I will say the OEM analog card + the HDTV Wonder card also exhibited similar issues when switching between A & D channels.Last but not least, image quality, I find the analog channel has good brightness and decent color saturation (most analog tuner cards have problems with color balance anyways). The digital tuner as expected didn't degrade the ATSC signal and does a great job with brightness, contrast and color saturation as well.
In short, a good balance of price, quality and stability. I even bought it for a friend and he notices improvments over his previous solution.
Read Best Reviews of Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder Here
The included IR Blaster does not work with the Motorola QIP-2500 STB.You can only record from the channel you are watching.This seems to be just fine and dandy with Hauppauge.Apparantly Hauppauge does not consider FIOS customers worthy of support and don't really want to hear from them.Haupauge support states that there is no working code.They also state that any resulting inconvenience is the fault of the customer for failing to verify that this" state of the art" device works with current technology.How foolish of me to assume it worked with a small,rinky dink, bit player like Verizon.
Hauppauge does not have any support at all on their USA webpage.There is a UK page that has a good forum, but nobody over their has FIOS so there is really no support.
Hauppage phone support consists of them arguing with you.Email support is nonexistant.They just deny any problems or blame the customer.You cannot get past the stonewalling.Even leaving messages for the USA distribution companies owner doesn't workthey just don't call back.
This is definitely a company you want to avoid.
Want Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder Discount?
Using this in a dedicated DVR computer in my living room. The quality of the encoding is great at standard DVD spec. Installation was a breeze, and the remote control is well configured.The reason I'm giving this product 4 stars instead of 5 is because of the software. First, the box included an older version of the WinTV recording software that remained on the machine when I installed the already-available (and much improved) new version. So, I had multiple versions competing to record scheduled programs. Additionally, the WinTV software is hard (if not impossible) to read on a TV screen. Tried all available screen resolutions but no dice. Same goes for the very limited schedule recording application. Very small, very lacking in functionality.
It all ties in well enough to the TitanTV program guide, but that guide is also limited.
Browsing for recorded shows is difficult.
All tasks are impossible without the aid of a keyboard and/or mouse. In my scenario, that wasn't going to work well because I wasn't planning to use either. The remote control, however, cannot be programmed to navigate around the different buttons and icons on your screen.
Enter SageTV.
I downloaded a trial version of the SageTV application, and instantly my experience with this device went from "eh..." to "WHOA!!!!" The SageTV application is an all-in-one deal that works closely with this and other Hauppage cards for the recording, program guide and other functions of the PVR/DVR experience. All text and icons are clearly legible on the screen, and all functions can be accessed via the Hauppage remote.
Setup is easy, and if you set the SageTV app to launch upon Windows startup, you do not need a keyboard or mouse (sidebar I'm trying out a wireless keyboard with integrated trackball right now, and it is nice for things like searching for content, renaming or editing labels on your recordings and so forth, but it's nice that using the SageTV application has freed me from feeling like I MUST have a traditional input device).
With that said, I will say that this Hauppage device is one of the finest tuner cards available and has a very nice remote, but is lacking in terms of included software to the degree that I will be spending $60 for a better software package. I would have preferred no software at all! Some places will sell you a combo 1600 card with remote and SageTV software, but I would recommending getting this unit first, then trying out the SageTV software to see if it is useful for your purposes rather than throwing all that money down upfront.
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