Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder

by Hauppauge

Product Details

• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000MGGTY8
• Item model number: 1178
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #34,390 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 7, 2004

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description The Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 includes dual TV tuners to let you watch both digital and analog television on your PC, in a window or full screen. With PVR software and built-in hardware for MPEG-2 encoding, you can also record television onto your computer for viewing later without slowing down your computer.

The Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 offers: Dual TV tuners to watch digital and analog television signals. Compatible with ATSC and QAM digital TV, and analog cable TV signals. Dbx-TV stereo decoding for spectacular sound. Built-in MPEG-2 hardware encoding.

Dual tuners lets you watch both digital and analog signals. View larger.

Watch High-definition Digital TV on Your Computer
With dual format TV tuners, the WinTV-HVR-1600 lets you watch ATSC digital TV as well as QAM digital TV and analog cable TV. ATSC digital TV, which typically requires an antenna for reception, is the over-the-air HDTV standard for North America. ATSC broadcasts range in resolution from standard definition up to the high definition 1080i format. (To check the ATSC digital transmissions in your area, input your zip code at titantv.com.)

The WinTV-HVR-1600 also lets you watch and record QAM channels, which are unencrypted digital channels broadcast by your local cable operator. If you don't have access to digital television channels yet, you can also watch regular analog cable television. And with the included remote control, you can control your cable TV or satellite set top box.

In addition to high-definition video, the card also features a dbx-TV stereo decoder for great TV sound. The card has Composite/S-Video and audio inputs that allow for connecting VCRs or cable/satellite set top boxes.

Your Own Personal Digital Video Recorder!
With the included software, you can easily record TV shows to your hard disk using MPEG-2. Several recording options are available depending on your playback needs; higher quality video requires more disk space. Generally, 5 gigabytes of disk space is used per hour of ATCS digital TV recordings.. Thanks to the built-in hardware MPEG-2 encoder, your PC continues to run at full speed even while recording.

The WinTV application offers an elegant interface to watch TV in a window or full screen. View larger.

With the WinTV-Scheduler software, easily schedule the recordings of your favorite television shows daily, weekly, or just once. You can then play back the recordings at your leisure, burn them onto CD or DVD for playback on another computer or your television, or with video editing software (not included), you can edit the shows. This is great for saving favorite movie clips, or of your favorite teams dramatic last-second win or your favorite player's grand slam.

The Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 plugs into a PCI slot and is compatible with Windows Vista, XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows XP Media Center Edition. With XP-MCE and Vista, you can add the WinTV-HVR-1600 as either the primary or secondary TV tuner. The Microsoft Media Center application supports up to two TV tuners so you can watch on channel while recording another.

What's in the Box
WinTV-HVR-1600 PCI card, IR remote control receiver, IR Blaster (remote control), CD-ROM with WinTV software.

Product Description

The WinTV-HVR-1600 is a dual tuner analog and high definition digital ATSC PCI TV tuner for Vista PCs. On a single full height PCI board WinTV-HVR-1600 has seperate tuners for analog NTSC and ATSC digital TV. With Vista's Media Center you can watch an analog TV channel while recording hi-def digital TV from another channel. Includes remote control. Microsoft Vista Compatible.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great value, June 7, 2007

By 

RJMacReady "RJMacReady" (Green Bay, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder (Personal Computers)

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.

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 100% Compatible With Vista's Media Center, March 17, 2007

By 

IniquiTrance "n+1" (New York State) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder (Personal Computers)

Strengths: FAST channel switching, Vista compatible, Remote works with Media Center, Dual tuners for analog and ATSC content

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.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fast tuning... great signal sensitivity, robust & stable, September 6, 2007

By 

PDX-P-Diddy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder (Personal Computers)

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.