Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 350 PCI WATCH RECORD TV ON YOUR PC WINDOWS 98/ME/XP ( 990 )

Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 350 PCI WATCH RECORD TV ON YOUR PC WINDOWS 98/ME/XP ( 990 ) | Great analog video capture and output quality

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Hauppauge WINTV-PV...

	Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 350 PCI WATCH RECORD TV ON YOUR PC WINDOWS 98/ME/XP ( 990 ) HAUPPAUGE average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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Watch and record your TV shows with instant replay and program pause. Burn your favorite TV shows onto CD-ROM or DVD and play them on your home DVD player. Includes hi-performance hardware MPEG2 encoder!

The WinTV-PVR brings live TV to your PC screen. With WinTV-PVR's 125-channel cable ready TV receiver, you can watch TV in a resizeable window or full screen. Or listen to FM radio with our built-in stereo FM receiver.

But thats not all!!

WinTV-PVR puts TV watching under your control! Watch what you want, when you want! With WinTV-PVR you can pause TV when you want, create your own instant replay and even burn your TV shows onto CD-ROM!

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Great hardware, Software included not so good

I bought the PVR 350 to transfer VHS and Beta to hard disk for eventual transfer to DVD (when I get a DVD burner), as well as to experiment with replacing VCRs with a home-made replacement. My plans included a dual-boot system (Windows 2000 and RedHat Linux 9, both freshly loaded and updated prior to card installation) dedicated to my home entertainment system; hardware is a 933 MHz Pentium III, 512 MB, 10 GB plus 80 GB drives, ASUS motherboard, etc.
After working with the 350 for about a week now, I've got some opinions on some aspects of it. Overall, the hardware seems pretty good - no problem at all with the TV component outputs from the card to the TV - mpegs recorded off of cable seem to be just as good as the original feed. No problems at all with audio/video synchronization I see often complained about elsewhere - I've yet to have any sync problems (after probably 20 hours of recording). I'm getting between 1 to 2 GB of file size per hour, so my 80 GB drive would seem to be good for at least 40 hours.
Only real problem I've had is with the nanoPEG editing software, and a slight problem with the PVR350 software (drivers or application, I don't know). First, the main software will not play the last 5 to 10 seconds of the MPEG file to the TV outputs. After doing a fair amount of editing - getting rid of stuff at the beginning and end of a tape transferred to the PC, I find that I'm missing the final few seconds (often disruptingly so) of the file. However, I can verify the information *is* in the file when I play it on the PC screen via Windows Media player, etc. The nanoPEG can't join two files, either, although it seems to succeed. My correction to the first problem was to attempt to append 10 seconds of blank screen/no audio to the end of affected clips. What I ended up with was a ten minute file that now says its 10 seconds long, even though it keeps playing past the 10 second mark, but you can't do any jog or other operations with the resulting file.
The DVD-making software seems pretty good (Ulead DVD Movie Factory), but, as I have no DVD burner yet, I can't say for sure - I went through the motions of creating one, and it seems not bad (but I have no experience with DVD creation software).
And, Hauppauge tech support seems fairly unresponsive. I sent them email, no response.
My next step will be to work with it under Linux (all previous comments refer to it under Windows 2000), but then all of the software is Open-Source, and I know I'm on my own.
In short, the hardware seems pretty good, but I'm not too impressed with some basic issues with the WinTV2000 viewing software and the NanoPeg editing software.

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Great analog video capture and output quality

After 6 months, I only use the Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 350 for analog video capture and output to/from a VCR. The personal videorecorder (PVR) feature was a disappointment.
Pros:
1. Great analog video capture and output quality.
2. Great analog cable TV channel video quality (although I'd rather watch TV on a TV)
Cons:
1. The user interface is not designed for analog video capture and output, and is awkward to figure out and use. For example, you click the tiny green bar twice to switch from the cable TV input to the composite video input, and you capture and output video by clicking on the Record button.
2. Only MPEG-2 740x480 with 44.1 kHz audio outputs correctly, otherwise you can get strange error messages like "there is no common media type between these pins".
3. Occasionally I get a blue screen error in another driver when shutting down my PC after using WinTV, so I suspect it's driver has a wild write bug that is overwriting another driver.
4. When playing back recorded TV programs, there is no Close Captioning (I've come to depend on this due to a slight hearing loss).
5. It doesn't mark/skip commercials like my Panasonic VCR.
6. The remote control is so difficult to use to manually skip commercials that I gave up on using WinTV as a PVR, and never even tried the Snapstream trial.

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Stick with it, just dump the supplied software

I bought this solely for use as a PVR and things really didn't look good at first and I was on the verge of returning it for a refund. Then I realised that there's some VERY good alternative software out there which is free. After trying a lot of different driver versions for this card and numerous other pieces of software I have now settled on a program called GBPVR. It completely replaces the awful WinTV software and works so well, that I have turned a computer into a full time entertainment machine and stored it in the TV rack as opposed to on the desk.
Not only does it give you 7 days worth of TV listings through a very nice interface, you can use it as a music jukebox, a newsreader, a video archiver, you can check the weather forecast on it, get theatre listings, rip DVD's, the list goes on and I can do this all without even connecting the computer to a keyboard, mouse or monitor. It simply runs through my TV and I use the supplied remote to control everything.
The PVR functions are excellent, it does just about everything a TiVo box does and is just as nice to use. The onscreen displays are nicely laid out and the remote is suddenly a very logical thing to use, a big improvement over the Hauppauge software.
The best improvement they could make to this product would be to enable it to handle DivX compression, so then you'd get a lot more recording for your hard drive space.
Don't let the bad software put you off, with a bit of time and perseverence, you can have a fully functioning PVR (and a whole lot more) for much less than you would have to shell out for something like Sky+

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reviews: page 1, 2

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