Customer Reviews

Hauppauge-WinTV-PVR-500 MCE Bundle TV Tuner/Personal Video Recorder

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The card and remote work great. Reception clarity is much better than an older version card from this same company and the remote control works solidly and well. They interface and work with the XP Media Edition beautifully.

The only negative I have is that the installation instructions are a bit lacking - kind of like poorly updated, simple translation of cursory foreign notes. They are not entirely accurate/complete on the contents (didn't mention that there are actually two cards - one small one for part of the external connections) and thus not mentioning anything about it for install. (But just installing it in the next slot and connecting the two cards together with the wire on the second card into the only place that it fits on the first card as if they were one, things work fine.)

I'm very happy with the performance.

Back in the day it was a great card... now most cable companies have moved over to DTV and have limited the number of analog channels... as a result this card grows increasingly less useful.

I've had this for over a year as a replacement for an ATI card that never worked well (they hung the user community out to dry on Media Center drivers and never got their own software working well). The PVR-500 has been a breath of fresh air. Vista Media Center recognized it and, other than some odd key placement on the remote control, it is a very easy to use system. I love the dual tuner so more than one show can be recorded. I put this in a now 6 year old Dell PC, upgraded to Vista (barely), dedicated to this function and have had no issues. The fan is a bit loud on the card, so I set up an IR repeater and put it in a closet. Of course this is an analog tuner system so it has its limitations in the new HD Digital world, but I'm holding on to Analog cable till the industry finally lets a PC based DVR setup work (with cablecard). Then I'll get another Happauge system for sure.

Search for a long time for a good tuner,finally found this 500 series had only but great experience with this dual tuner.The software that comes with it is a joke; but i bought it to run with vista.Had wonderful results no negative feed back.Shipping was great a little to pricey when compared with new egg but it was worth the extra couple of dollars.

Amazon was great about shipping this product, but I eventually returned it due to several problems.

I never tried any recordings using the Media Center software that is part of Windows MCE. I was using it with SnapStream BeyondTV 4.1. If you record using anything but the Best (DVD 720x480) quality level it would crop out part of the picture. This is a known issue that is apparently a driver issue. The latest Hauppauge driver did not solve the problem.

The other problem I had is that several times when I was recording two programs at the same time, one of the recordings had nothing but static for the audio portion of it. I don't know if this was a problem with the card or BeyondTV, but I think it's probably due to the card. I don't know if I had a defective card or if this is just a problem with all of these cards.

I also was not that impressed with the overall quality of the video this card captured. I have Hauppauge 250 and 350 cards in a couple of other PCs, and the video quality they capture is noticeably better than that captured by the 500 card. After reading some reviews, it sounds like this is the case for the 150 card also (and the 500 card is basically just two 150s placed on one card). BeyondTV works great with the 250 and 350 cards with none of the issues noted above; but I also only have one tuner card in the PCs that I use these cards in, so I can't comment on how well they would work in a dual tuner setup using BeyondTV.

I returned the 500 card, and I instead purchased two VisionTek Xtasy Theater 550 Pro cards. Thus far I'm not having any of the issues with them in BeyondTV that I was having with the Hauppauge 500 card -- I can record at a lower quality level with no cropping, and I've had no audio issues so far. The quality of the video is also far superior to that captured by the 500 card (although maybe not as good as that captured by the Hauppauge 250 and 350 cards).

Great product, I have multiple products from this company and this one is definitely up to par.