Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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 non- existant.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 work- they just don't call back.
This is definitely a company you want to avoid.

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.

Getting the Tuner to work was as easy as pointing driver installation to the drivers folder on the included winTV disc. After Installing three different remote apps on the disc, along with a vista mce patch, the remote now works perfect with Vista's MCE. The picture looks great, and the remote is pretty good.

I now need a bunch of HD Space though due to my recordings with MCE. Which is only 90 hours with my 400 Gigs... I love the quality of this sound card, it is great. But of course there is no documentation... the only down side. On vista, click cancel on the prompts. open the cd manually and run setup. It should run the Vista Installer automatically. If something goes wrong, just do what i did and click every remote app till your remote works! heh. Also, The silver IR Receiver works with the remote . The other one is for changing channels on your cable box when using the s-video in.(again, no documentation)

I would definitely buy again (I might buy one more for dual HD tuners in MCE if they support it).

I give the card 4 stars and the software 2.5 stars, for an overall rating of 4 stars.

Card produces great picture quality. I am using an old outdoor antenna plus a 20db to 30db adjustable amplifier from Radio Shack. I only got about 4 channels without the amplifier and between 28 to 50 channels with the amplifier. I bought a big new HDTV antenna, but I need to install it outdoors, because it doesn't work well enough indoors. HDTV is way better than analog. The picture quality is perfect and much higher resolution.

You need a reasonably powerful computer to handle this card. At first I was using a PC with an Athlon XP 1800+ CPU and Radeon 9700 card. I could watch HDTV on this, but there was some occasional lagging or stuttering of the video. It was not quite fast enough of a computer. Then I tried to upgrade the CPU, and ended up killing the computer. So I built a brand new computer with really high specs! My new PC has a Athlon 64 X2 5600+ cpu, 2gb Corsair ram, and EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card. Now it handles the HDTV very easily. I can even play a recorded video at the same time as I have the HDTV running.

The WinTV software works, but it is lacking a couple of things. First of all, it will not adjust the proportion of the picture to your monitor. When you watch in full screen mode, it just stupidly stretches the whole picture to cover your entire monitor. I use a 16/10 proportion widescreen monitor. Therefore all the 16/9 and 4/3 tv shows are stretched out of proportion in full screen mode. Also, the timer recording software does not work! That is, when I try to schedule shows for recording, that just doesn't work. I bought a WinTV card a few years ago and I returned it because the software was utter crap and would not even install properly. This new WinTV software is far better, but it still needs improvement for the above reasons! Why do they insist on releasing good hardware with inadequate software? Is it so hard or expensive to create decent software with complete functionality? I doubt it! I used to do computer programming, and I think with just a little more effort they could've made this software complete. I'm not asking for some super fancy software, I just want something with a complete set of basic functions that I need! Another problem was that they don't give you any software to play your recorded HDTV programs! You can record them, but not play them with your WinTV software! So I had to find software that would play these big HDTV files. So I got VLC (a free program) to play the files. It works great. I also got the BeyondTV software to watch HDTV. I use that one most of the time instead of the WinTV software. BeyondTV shows all the programs in correct proportion on my 16/10 monitor in full screen mode. Also, the BeyondTV timer scheduling feature actually works and is easy to use. However, BeyondTV has one problem, in that it doesn't have an instant recording feature that works the way I want. So when I need to record something immediately while I watch, then I go back to using WinTV for that. So I am using three different pieces of software for all my TV viewing. I should only have to use ONE and WinTV should have provided that! I haven't tried to do any video editing. The video editing software that comes with WinTV is probably a piece of junk and I haven't tried it yet. I know it has minimal capabilities. Fortunately there is rarely a show that I'd want to edit and keep permanently, but I'm gonna have to find some good software to edit a few important shows and burn them to DVD.

From what I've read and from my own experience, it seems that this card does not have a very sensitive tuner, so it may be difficult for you to get all the available stations. Even with a 30db amplifier, I'm still getting only about 30 stations and some of them are not very strong. I can get 52 stations on my Zenith converter box WITHOUT using an amplifier and all 52 channels are rock solid! I probably will consider getting a better HDTV card eventually, if my new HDTV antenna does not get me all the channels with this card.

This card works very well and produces a good HDTV picture. The only problem is the software that comes bundled is worthless so expect to use 3rd party software such as Microsoft's Media Center, SageTV, or BeyondTV. I personally purchased SageTV to compliment the card for a full feature home theater PC.

Card and software installation was fine, under Vista Ultimate 64-bit. However, the WinTV application just doesn't work well under Vista--I have 4GB of fast RAM and a GeForce 8800GTX--the fastest card you can buy today. Half the time, I get no picture or sound, 40 percent of the time, picture and sound are jerky. Ten percent of the time, everything is great--but don't even think of multitasking.

Coming out of sleep mode or hibernation, WinTV2K simply WILL NOT WORK: A system reboot is required.

I much preferred my WinTV USB2 PVR to this card; however, my USB2 PVR isn't supported under Vista64.

I recently purchased this Hauppauge card, and after three days of futzing with it, I sent it back for a refund. In all that time I was able to view about 30 seconds of video ... the rest of the time my machine either showed no picture, or just froze. I am running XP on a system that meets the "requirements" but I fear your setup needs to be WAY BEYOND (as usual) the requirements to run properly. Issues I had:

* Some kind of conflict in the PCI ports. I wasted two days trying to debug this problem, and gave up. It is not "plug and play" for everyone, by any means. It caused my Linksys wi-fi card to stop working.

* I could rarely tell whether the remote control was functioning or not. The extremely flimsy "IR Blaster" is a tangle of wimpy little cords. Just what I wanted, another rat's nest... Not. The whole setup is not elegant at all, and not what I wanted. Who wants to push a button on a remote 20 times wondering when the response will come, or which of the various components isn't working?

* The included hardware "WinTV" etc. spit out errors on install every time. ONCE after a clean install I got the software to launch without freezing, for the abovementioned 30 seconds.

It has been a long time since I went about adding devices or otherwise customizing my PC further. Now I remember why. Device conflicts, buggy software, "third-pary-add-on" junk hardware is the norm on Windoze PCs. What a waste of time.