Customer Reviews

Hauppauge 1187 WinTV-HVR-1250 Hybird PCI-Ex1 TV Tuner 1187

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

 

 

This TV Tuner Card works well once you download the new drivers, etc. from the website. As I use it primarily for putting old VHS tapes to my hard drive to burn to DVD, I was a little frustrated at the lack of instructions as to how to set the Tuner Card up. That seems to be a common problem with most electronic items these days though as this is not the first product I have purchased with less than satisfactory documentation. Once I got it all figured out after much research on the internet, it works great. I would have given it 4, maybe even 5 stars if the instructions had been better.

does what it's supposed to do. needs enormous processor power for hd.
included software did not work, i had to download their beta software to get going. all very confusing, took a while to realize that the software was the problem.

I was able to get this to work on my Comcast service (no cable box, non-premium, QAM channels) on Windows Media Center, Windows 7 PC, with a bit of work. It was not completely the devices fault, though it may have bit of a weak tuner in pulling in the signal. I found that even though my Sony HDTV could see the QAM signals, the 1250 could not.

It turned out that I had to remove the distribution amplifier and be sure that all the coax cables were as short and well made as possible.

The symptom that the 1250 gives when it doesn't receive analog or QAM signals is that the "tuners" are not found. Initially it found the analog tuner since Comcast still has a few analog channels, but no QAM tuner showed up when Media Center was being set up. Sometimes the Analog tuner didn't show up when I tried a rescan.

However, Once I got the distribution amps out of the way, reduced the number of splitters, and made the coax cables as short as possible the QAM and Analog tuners showed up consistently in Media Center setup and the system found over 100 QAM channels.

The other gotcha is that the 1250 doesn't show all the channels it detects (so they don't show up in the Media Center Guide). It only shows you what it thinks are the "unscrambled" channels. However, even though the card thinks it is a scrambled channel, I found that if I looked at each channel, some of them would be decoded. I could then check the channel to be included in the active channel list. In the end I went from the setup saying I only had 35 channels to having nearly 100 QAM stations.

So now I have all the non-premium stations visible.

The remaining challenge is with Windows 7 which doesn't give me guide information on most of the channels. This is typical with QAM, but other systems seem to be able to let you force a network designation on a channel so the schedule downloads. So far, I can only do this if there is already a channel shown in the guide (I can assign and exsiting schedule to other channels). If the system was not expecting a network, you apparently can't assign it to a station. For example, I get QAM Style, but that was not in the original list of channels Windows 7 was expecting (based on my zip input and cable company lineup choice). So, there does not seem to be a way to get the guide to go ahead and pull down the Style channel programs in the guide. I see I'm way off topic, but the reason you buy these cards is to have a DVR setup and I wanted to relay some of my experiences in setting this up.

Great card for Linux. I do not know how well it performs under other OS. But I bought it build my HTPC with MythTV and so far I am very happy with it. It worked out of the box.

Had no problems setting this up with 64-bit Windows 7. I get about 30 or 40 channels with Comcast clear QAM but a lot of them have to be manually added and the guide information has to be assigned to the channel. This is the same card as the Hauppage 1196 on Amazon; it just doesn't have a remote. So if you don't need a remote, save 10 bucks and get this one instead.

The product installed easily. I downloaded the newer version of the software and it installed just fine. It's a great product and I love using it. I would recommend buying this product.

I bought the tuner card to replace my cable co's DVR which I couldn't afford anymore.
The card works great once you have named all the channels that comes over the cable without a cable box. The tuner card can detect the channels but cannot always tell you if it's Bravo or Lifetime or MSNBC. There's a menu to name all the channels that you receive. The tuner card works greater than I expected, especially with Windows 7. I really like being able to watch a recorded show while the card is recording another one. My only regret is that I didn't buy the card with two tuners so I could record two tv shows at the same time. What I'll save by giving up my DVR will pay for this card many times over.

I have two of these boards, one in each HTPC. I found them both very easy to install, recognized by Windows 7 without issue and I've found them to be rock solid and reliable. I am using them to tune unencrypted QAM with the basic cable package of my cable provider. I use Windows 7 Media Center and the frontend to watch TV. It tunes the HD channels and the picture quality is excellent. I've never had any problem with the cards, either hardware or driver-wise. The only thing I would do different is I would have spent the extra money on the dual digital tuner HVR-2250 since it seems to always be recording an HD channel when I want to watch another one. With this model you can use both the digital and analog tuners at the same time but with the HVR-2250 you could use two digital tuners at once.

Built a PVR for something to do, this Hauppauge is working great, impressed with the HD picture quality on my 42" plasma (I only have 720p). I had NO luck with this tuner using Windows Xp and gave up, but now using Vista Home Premium w/ Media Center, Very Nice. I have a Media Center remote, that with Media Center, Pentium Dual Core, 3GB-PC5300, 512MB HDMI Video Card, and the On Screen Scheduling, Excellent!
As soon as I moved the tuner from Xp to Vista's Media Center, install went easy, I may buy another!

This tv adapter came in about 2 days. Installed in less then 15 minutes as windows already had the drivers. We use it to record Pokemon for my little ones. We didn't want to have to pay 15$ for a dvr fee from the cable company. This is going to save us a ton of money and our little ones are happy. This product also receives some HD programming which is a bonus. Highly recommend for a budget tv adapter.