Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 TV Tuner

WinTV-HVR-1600 TV Tuner brings over-the-air high definition ATSC digital TV, clear QAM digital cable TV and analog cable TV to your PC. Watch and record TV in a window or full screen using high quality MPEG-2. WINTV-HVR-1600 TV Tuner adds great features to your TV viewing: high definition TV reception, automatic identification of channel names plus records high-definition digital TV programs to your PC's hard disk in an MPEG-2 format without any loss in quality.

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• Reviewed by: old_cotton

  02-24-08

  Duration of ownership: 1 Weeks

  Strengths: Supports QAM; Windows Media compatible remote control.

  Weaknesses:WinTV application is buggy.

  Overall Evaluation: I am glad that I made the right decision. I'm very happy with this card. It works fine without any problems so far though the WinTV application has some small bugs. The remote control works great. The IR Blaster which comes in the box is very handy. Now I can watch HDTV from my computer! Great product!

• Reviewed by: sonoma03

  01-16-08

  Duration of ownership: 21 Days

  Strengths: NTSC, ATSC, and QAM tuners included. Good reception of TV channels

  Weaknesses:WinTV softwareIncorrect/incomplete instructions

  Overall Evaluation: I purchased this product from Dell because this MCE kit version was the only version of the HVR-1600 that said it had a QAM tuner. I ran into problems because Dell's Web site said that this product is compatible with Windows XP Home and XP Media Center Edition as well as Vista. It turns out that the product that was sent to me is only compatible with Vista, as correctly described on Pricegrabber. The main problem was the IR remote receiver which only works with Vista. I wasted many hours trying to install it, looking for new drivers on the Web and so forth, before getting confirmation from Hauppauge technical support that I needed a different receiver. Fortunately they were willing to swap out mine for one that was XP-compatible, although I did have to pay shipping.The other issue was trying to receive a QAM signal. Even though the instructions say the ATSC connector is only for connecting an over-the-air antenna, you need to split your cable signal and input it to both the NTSC and ATSC inputs in order to get both NTSC and QAM channels. The card will not pick them up from the NTSC connector input, even though my TV does that. That caused more wasted hours.The WinTV software found the channels and plays them okay, but it does not have a good TV guide feature. You have to enter in the actual dates and times for the recordings. I installed the free GBPVR software instead, which has a TV guide and you can just click on a program to watch or record it, and you can search for instances of a particular show and record them.

• Reviewed by: geo442

  12-31-07

  Duration of ownership:

  Strengths: Good reception of both digital and analog channels, acceptable framerates all around.

  Weaknesses:Lack of QAM, large size, lunky software.

  Overall Evaluation: I have been using this card for a few months (upgraded fom a KWorld ATSC 120 that was having frame tearing issues on a computer that otherwise was so overspeced that the bad framerate could be squarely blamed on the card). The 1600 is a larger card than the KWorld one, but it has worked much better than its predecessor (the one exception is that I think I liked teh KWorld's software a bit better -- but the KWorld software was more of a pain to install properly, which maybe makes that a wash).Overall, though, the incremental price for the 1800 series card (Which is PCI-e x1 and has QAM) probably makes it a better alternative for an only slightly larger cost -- having used both, I wish I had bought the 1800 instead (and probably will at some point soon).

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