Customer Reviews

Hauppauge 1128 WinTV-HVR-1850 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a full height, single slot PCIe X1 board, which means it fit perfectly in the top slot on an nVidia 680i mobo with 2 8800 cards configured in SLI.

The 1800 installed in my Vista 64 Bit system flawlessly despite that the enclosed CD only had drivers for XP. Didn't even need it because Vista installed the drivers from on line automatically. Slick!

Integration with Vista 64 Media Center was automatic.

I'm just hooked up to analog cable and FM so I can't speak about the digital qualities just yet, other than to say the analog picture looks fantastic. Somehow I'm not too worried. The tuner just feels right and solid, not like some funky finicky A*I kludge.

The IR Media Center Remote Control is a real remote control and though some of the buttons are incredibly small I can't complain too much. It comes with batteries and works well with the USB Remote Receiver. Vista 64 installed drivers for this as well. I'm stunned.

And so far very, very happy with this purchase.

Just a heads up, ANTonline shipped me a white box and not a retail package.

Easy Setup and installation with Vista Home Premium! Hooked up a VCR to copy VHS to DVD! It worked great! Remote works perfect with Media Center. Remote is a plus to have when watching DVD's or listening to music on the computer. Have yet to set up satellite but should seem painless after hooking up VCR. Very little instructions given to set up TV or VCR. See manual TV setup in Media Center.

I picked this card up to record HD channels on our local cable provider. When I tried it with the Windows Vista Media center, it would not decode the digital or HD channels. I grabbed a copy of the Snapstream (snapstream.com) Media Beyond TV software and I was able to pick up the digital channels. The resolution and clarity of the picture is excellent. The included remote and receiver work very nicely. Snapstream provides it's own remote that works with the Beyond TV software and allows control of all the functions that the Hauppaug remote provides. Together, I was able to build a HD PVR for under $200!!

Overall, I am very satisfied with this product. The picture is great, it provides me with the ability to record Digital and HD programs and replay them on my 52" big screen.

If you use this product with Windows Media Center (WMC), there is a problem with the FM Radio Tuner. When you try to use the FM Radio, it may go into an infinite loop telling you that you must set up the TV signal in order to use the FM Radio. If you are using just an ATSC antenna, the TV setup will find the one antenna (ATSC) and FM Radio will still not work (and once again tell you go through the TV setup). You MUST lie to WMC, going through the manual antenna setup and tell it that you have BOTH an ATSC and an NTSC antenna. After doing so, the FM Radio will begin working. The downside is that when watching TV, you'll have the NTSC channels (analog static) in your listing. I need to try to figure out how to get rid of those. You still will have your ATSC channels, too.

The other downside is that the ATSC seems to only tune in the primary channel. For example, on my HDTV, I can tune to 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 (primary, weather, RetroTV Network, respectively). On this card the subchannels do not get tuned.

It seems to work reasonably well for what it does pick up, but if you're expecting to be able to get through setup without trouble, and tune to all of the available ATSC channels, you'll be disappointed.

I have used this card both in my Windows Vista setup and Linux.

The digital side of the card is brilliant - crystal clear picture and no noticeable system performance hit while it is recording. Granted, recording digital is just transferring a stream of 1's and 0's over the PCIe bus. I have only recorded over-the-air digital broadcasts (ATSC) on this side of the card.

Analog cable reception was reasonable under SageTV, although somewhat less clear than the same analog cable channels on my LCD TV. My antenna and cables are cheap, which I found hurts the signal considerably more for this card than when attached to the TV.

If I just wanted to record digital, which may suffice for many people, I would have opted for one of the software-based cards at half the cost. I still have enough analog cable channels to warrant the hardware encoder.

One feature I have yet to use is the composite IN. If it goes well, this should be a nice feature for digitizing old VHS tapes.

I can warn that I had no real success in setting up this card in MythTV (MythBuntu, to be precise) although a small no-nonsense TV application called MeTV did a great job recording hours of sharp over-the-air Olympics broadcasts for me off of a channels.conf file. If it weren't for the latter success, I would assume the card isn't supported in Linux. But despite the ambiguity of web sources on this point, the digital tuner of this card is in fact supported in kernel 2.4.

Purchased this card for a new Vista 64 Ultimate workstation. Windows did not see the card to install it. I borrowed an XP machine and it installs in that one fine, but since it isn't mine, I can't use it in the XP.

Update: sent the card to the hardware vendor, who had the same experience. He was finally able to move cards around in the machine and make it work, sending me the configuration, which works here as well. The trick may be that this card needs to be the first PCI-e card in the stack. Hardware vendor technician believed it was related to the card's ability to maintain identity across various bus-to-bus bridges.

If I could edit the rating I'd raise it at least to 3 stars; but installing it in the right slot without any guidance is a matter of luck.

Much of the other reviews cover everything, so I'll mention things that were highlights for me.

The first thing I did was download the latest software/drivers from the Hauppauge website. I installed the card in an empty slot and then installed the software. The card took off without a hitch. The features integrate directly with Windows Media Center. You get a complete 14-day guide (based on your cable input settings) and it keeps track of the shows you've recorded so you can jump right into watching.

I initially purchased this to pull in digital channels from the air. I'm in Ohio. According to the software there were 14 possible channels, but I found out that at my location the reception was poor--so much so that most channels didn't even come in or were sporadic. If you're relying on digital channels from the air, be sure you're in an area where you can receive a good signal. I tried antennas but couldn't get the channels to come in well enough to watch any of them. This isn't the card's fault. I decided then that I should go ahead and invest in digital cable. What I didn't realize is that digital cable (Time-Warner) is in a different format that the card can't tune in. I ended up just getting analog.

Picture quality is what you would expect with an analog signal on an LCD monitor. It's blurry and noisy, but keep in mind you're displaying a signal that was meant for a TV on a monitor designed for high-end graphics. The nature of analog is what makes the picture look the way it does and it's not the fault of the card. I saw a reviewer mention the VisionTek card that uses some sort of picture enhancement. That's great and all, but I wonder how much of a load the picture processing puts on your system.

The software found the analog channels easily and set up my local listings. Recording is a breeze and since all encoding goes through the card, it takes the load off of your processor. I don't even notice recording when it's happening. I can play a game or watch a DVD at the same time without issue. You've gotta love it.

For the price and ease of use, this card can't be beat. It performs its functions flawlessly. I'm completely happy with it.

I first set this up with XP Media Center and had all kinds of trouble. The TV signal would cut in and out and pausing and rewinding was horrible. I then upgraded to Vista Ultimate and everything works perfectly now. The digital cable picture looks just as good as if it was connected straight from the set-top box to the tv. Pausing and rewinding works great. The remote is also very nice and worked perfectly.

The TV Tuner is good. It does what it is supposed to on the analog side.

On the digital side, there is a slight problem with the audio sync.

The sound is slightly behind the video.

Probably something I am doing wrong but haven't figured it out yet.

In general I use an antenna. I think the multiple splitters might have something to do with it. Or the processor speed might be too low.

I have also noticed the digital is not being broadcast at full strength yet and many stations are off the air digital at least part of the time. Cincinnati seems to be bad about this right now. Channel 12, 19, and 48 all come in a little snowbound on regular tv but only show up part time on the digital side. I am in North Dayton on a fairly high location. I use a winegard deep fringe antenna about 30 feet above ground.

In all, I think the product is good. I think an included program to sync the sound on the slower processors would have been helpful. When I change the slower system over to Ubuntu the problem will probably disappear.

This is my second Hauppauge capture card. My first was an all analog model and I have had it for 6 years with no trouble. I have had this card installed now for about a month and it is working fine. I chose this card over the 2250 as it had 2 connection points, 1 for analog and 1 for digital. The 2250 has one with 2 tuners and each can do analog or digital. For what I wanted, capture analog video from camcorder, and to DVR live digital ota tv, it was a plus to have 2 separate inputs versus using a splitter\combiner and sending both signals in 1 source as splitters degrade your overall signal. The card is recognized by windows media center in Windows 7 64 bit with no problem. I have not tried the remote or media blaster features as they are not important to what I use it for so I can not comment on them. The recordings I make from live TV are phenomenal but I do have a good clean signal. The analog capture can be set to 4 different levels, Fair, Good, Better, Best and file size increases with each jump. I normally just use the fair setting and it produces nice results and allows for about 2.5 hours of recording on a single DVD. Their compression must have changed as the original analog card I had could fit a solid 3 hours on a DVD using the DVD LP setting. All in all I am very happy with this card and could recommend it.