Customer Reviews

Avermedia HDTV MCE A180 whitebox MTVHDA18

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I recently built a home theater PC for my living room. With football season coming up, I wanted to be able to receive high definition TV from free over the air (OTA) providers. After shopping around, I found this product, and although it is relatively new, I decided to try it, as it is half the price of the only competing product I can find, the ATI HDTV Wonder.

I have zero complaints. After following the directions on the Avermedia website, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (which this product is designed for) recognized it with no problems.

For anyone who is not familiar with home theater PCs, HDTV, and such, I will caution you...there is a lot to learn in order to get it all to work. A great resource for you is the Windows Media Center webpage from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/communities/mediacenter.mspx

Read the articles and check out the forums--there are many highly qualified people there who can help you with all of your questions about building, or modifying your own HTPC. Good luck!

I can't believe how easy this card was to install and setup. It was as easy as 1-2-3. I plugged the card into my HTPC, installed the drivers, and that's it! I've been watching, time-shifting, and recording lots of OTA HD material and it's been great. And now that Avermedia has released a new driver that supports dual A180's, I'm thinking I might have to pick up another one.

The previous poster that rated the card with a single card is just plain wrong. For one thing, Windows XP MCE 2004 does not support HDTV; only Windows XP MCE 2005 does. I don't understand why he would be complaining to anyone but himself since he was the one who was mistaken. It's clearly stated in the system requirements that it's 2005 ready, not 2004. And Avermedia has absolutely nothing to do with his transaction. His only option would be to either return the card to Amazon or simply upgrade his Media Center to 2005. I think it's unfair to judge the card on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the card itself.

Easy installation. Works flawlessly in MCE2005. You do need good video card and CPU to decode HD content.

Overall a solid product for the price.

It installed without any issues, and has been working well so far (no crashes etc. for a couple of weeks). I have 2 working simultanesouly with Media Center 2005 using the recently released drivers with dual-card support.

The only reason I gave it 4 starts instead of 5 is that the tuner is not the most sensitive I've seen. I have an old Samsung OTA HDTV box that is able to pull in channels this card can't. This is not a major problem though, as I can get all the major channels in my area.

Product works as expected, delivery was good. Used the software you can download from Avermedia, and that didn't work for beans, but I mainly got it for Media Center, so it wasn't an issue. Just wanted to try it out.

We have tried several different brands of HDTV tuners in our media center PCs and we have found that the AverMedia A180 is the best card. We have no trouble at all with this card and it performs flawlessly on each system we install it on. I highly recommend this card.

this was by far the cheapest HD-tuner card for windows mce 2005, and i am quite pleased w/ the performance. installation was straightforward, as was the setup in media center. i have had problems tuning some channels, but i believe that geography, not hardware, is causing my problems. definitely would recommend this to anyone who wants to add over the air hdtv broadcasts to their media center pc.

This card has worked well with Windows Media Center 2005. I had to upgrade my sound card to get my HDTV sound to work. This was a Windows Media Center issue not and issue with the card. By the way, you can get standard defintion digital braodcast with this card. You have to the digital channels manually. Aver tech support didn't know any thing about that feature.

Works great in my homebrew Media Center Edition computer. Great to watch hi-def, DD 5.1 tv on your desktop, even better to use the record function and have OTA HDTV programming ready when you are! And, at half the price of ATI's hdtv "wonder" offering it's a no brainer! Buy it!

The card installed without problems. The HD reception is very good. The signal strength supplied by an indoor antenna placed in the Attic bring in many channels with a strong signal. I am 38 miles from the towers and still get good reception. The interface to the MCE operating system was straight forward. The only problem I have is a video error on one channel when recording HD in MCE. Avermedia Support has been very helpful in trying to determine if this is their problem or the MCE. The error only occurs on the ABC HD channel and is still outstanding as of Jan. 22, 2007.