Customer Reviews

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE 2-Tuner PCI-Based Digital Video Recorder (NTSC)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It's great qualtity for the price. I had an EVGA dual tuner TV card prior to buying this one. The 500 MCE gives you a better picture and more connectivity. The colors are vibrant and the decoding is excellent. The only short coming is that MPEG decoder software is not included in the package and you'll have to purchase your own.

Word of wisdom: If your picture is choppy check if your hard drive speed is up to par. I wasted almost a week; formating my hard drive 3 times, replaced my tuner card twice and swapped my CPU. I was about to buy a new mother board before I realised my hard drive was the problem. I Bought a new SATA drive and it was smoooooooth sailing.

I bought this product for my linux based mythtv system. The great thing about this product (and the thing that really sets it apart from other models of WINTV-PVR) is the 2-tuner design. You plug in one cable connection into the card, within the card it splits the signal to 2 different tuners. This allows you to record two shows at the same time. This product works flawlessly. This card does support a radio tuner, however I really have found no use for it so I can't comment on that.

In short, even though this product might be more expensive then most, the cost is made up by great quality, functionality, and reliability. A must-have for anyone building a home-brewed PVR (Personal Video Recorder).

For anyone who is wondering, the awesome linux compatibility of all Hauppage products is why I will never buy anything other than hauppage.

I'll preface that I came to this from a WinTV-PVR 250. The quality on that card is much better than on this one. I was a bit disappointed (even though I read the reviews that said as much). Basically, I had to, though, because I watch and record so many shows (and will soon be using it in a multi-person home), so a dual tuner has become necessary.

Not saying the quality is unwatchable or anything like that. It's just not as good as the 150/250. Oh well. It's very much worth the money for what it does (dual tuners), but for me, it's just going to function as a stop gap until another company (or Hauppauge) comes out with a better dual tuner -- keeping in mind that I don't want to use Windows MCE since Beyond TV is more extensible IMHO (can you say Hydra TV server with a bunch of Beyond TV Links? see http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/hydra/default.asp for what I mean).

I think this is about the best of the current crop (end of year 2005) of dual tuner video cards. However, I am still looking forward to the next generation as this card and many in the same category have somewhat "mushy" video, slightly washed out color. This particular model has audio problems on some channels about 5% of the time, so recorded shows are sometimes not watchable. New drivers did not help. You can only use one type of video input at a time: either the 2 tuner coax inputs or the 2 A/V inputs (this is probably a limitation of MCE, not the card itself). It installed flawlessly and setup in Windows MCE was effortless -- perfect score on this count. The FM tuner works well, however for some reason you can't listen to FM while tuning a channel/recording (could be an MCE limitation again). Overall I love this card, but as I said, very anxious to see what the next gen offers.

The PVR-500 is a great card for use with the MythTV Linux PVR system, and I recommend it highly. It was easily recognized by my system and the dual tuners allow for viewing and recording of two sources at once (ie watch one channel, record another) I was hesitant about picking up the 500 after reading that Hauppauge had changed the tuners from one brand to another, but whatever issues other users had seem to be resolved, at least in the model I have.

I have a souped-up SONY media center computer that worked great under Windows XP MCE, .... until I upgraded to Vista.

After a frustrating month trying to get tv back on my SONY RB60G computer, Hauppauge came through for me.

This card is built very similar to the SONY Gigapocket tv-tuner card. but this one has dual tuners and an FM radio too.

Vista saw the card right away, and had it integrated into Media Center in no time. No sweat.

It works great.

FM radio is nothing to brag about, but it picks up four clear stations, and I have StepVoice so I can now record songs off the radio too.

This card is one of the few that features dual TV tuner. It works as expected and it recognized by Windows MCE (need Hauppauge drivers).

The image quality is pretty good for patching it thru the computer.

My main concerns lies with 1) the driver 2) tech support.

I've had the card for about a year now and it all worked great until I decided to update the driver. Now the second tuner image quality went from good to total junk, no matter which driver I use. The first tuner on the card still displays excellent image quality.
I believe the Hauppauge driver is to blame but so far I can't pinpoint what's wrong.
On the tech support side, don't expect too much. They "may" be able to tell you where to plug the card but that's about it! Don't ask them about drivers or other kind of issues they will blame Bill Gates, Microsoft, your graphics card manufacturer... Pretty sad.

Anyways, I would probably consider the Nvidia dual tuner card as an alternative (since it's pretty much the same price) or go the dual PCI route if you have some room.

This product did not work as advertised under the Windows XP x64 Edition operating system. Despite using the very latest drivers, I get a blank black display, and it works only immediately after restarting the PC (only for a short while).

I ended up going with PowerColor Theater 550 Pro PCI Express x1 which has better drivers for x64 from ATI. This also freed up a PCI slot that I needed.

Amazon was great about shipping this product, but I eventually returned it due to several problems. They were also great about the return -- they paid the return shipping and I got a full refund.

I never tried any recordings with this card 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).

I needed a TV card for my new Sony Vaio XP-MCE and i made a research on the best in the market, i agreed on this card when i checked the reviews and made sure this product is recommened by Microsoft in the market place site.

My experience with this card, its amazing very simple in its installation with MCE it got configured in a few seconds and very well recongnized with MCE i searched TV watched Live TV and MCE recognizes the 2-tuners it asks if you want to use one or both, its amazing at least the best thing in the market with MCE.

Theres an added card that comes with the package its for extra inputs incase you need composite or svideo so dont worry.