Hauppauge Win TV PVR Hauppauge ( ) Electronics Our Price : £ 149.99 Prices subject to change. usually dispatched within 24 hours.

Good capture card, but only on higher bitrates

I bought one about a year ago. Can capture real time without a single dropped frame on a Celeron 900 Mhz. Can capture VCD, SVCD and DVD resolution. The drivers are a bit difficult to install, they are not windows compatible, so they will work with only the cards software. Some codec packs - ACE for example - ruin the drivers. I use only XVID codec and DIVX. (I use WinDVD for mpeg-2 playback.)The quality of the tuner is very good, but I still thinking about better electric shading / grounding (sorry for my bad English) to improve quality. I use the composite input for capturing. If the input quality is good - like sat receiver - vcd quality is good. Hardware mpeg-2 encoding is working flawlessly, so it doesnt need cpu usage. Despite the good vcd capturing quality svcd captures are not as good as Ive expected. I use half DV resolution with 2Mbit/sec for concerts and 8Mbit/sec for full DV. Quality is great at 8Mbit, but capturing at lower bitrates (4,6 Mbit/sec) will have trouble with fast motion. I rate it 7.5/10.

Not worth the money

I bought the WinTV PVR 250 to replace my Pinnacle/Miro PCTV Unfortunately, the hauppage software has caused XP to crash on numerous occassions. There are sync problems video and audio together. The capture picture quality is not as good as my old Pinnacle card - its very blocky despite the hauppage being able to do MPEG2 DVD quality in hardware compression - the results look nothing like DVD - more like VCD on a bad day. The card is 125 channel cable ready - but if you are using digital cable/sat you can only tune to what the set top box is watching which makes the PVR ability fairly pointless. There are about a dozen different updates to install from their website including the bundled applications and utilities. By comparison Pinnacle have a single web installer/updater which is much easier. On the whole,

What a downer !!

I bought this with high hopes of converting my VHS to VCD, I have been following the advice on the web site support, still no luck in getting any sound from the thing, the picture can be shaky, the radio doesnt work, again sound. I was very nervous following their advice to edit the registry, with XP giving up all sorts of warnings, but I carried on, still no sound, wish I hadnt bothered buying it, over a month of frustration ,when building my new PC should have been a delight.