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pretty good but tough to install

Customer Rating:
This tuner card works great with Microsoft Windows 7 media center. With its dual tuners plus an older USB tuner I can record three shows at once or record two and watch a third.

When installing this I discovered it was too big for my small computer. Only after preparing to return it and searching for a replacement did I discover that it comes with parts to make it smaller. Nowhere in the instructions did I see this information and only when I looked for smaller cards did I recognize the adapter it came with.

When installing I had to add software, unlike my USB tuner, which worked immediately. Installing the remote software is tricky (as described elsewhere) and it was all for nothing because the remote barely works. I would say it responds to commands about 25% of the time.

I comes with a bunch of extra stuff I didn't use, like recording software and additional inputs and outputs.

Great Tuner card - get extra cable channels

Customer Rating:
I connected to cable and got stations I should only get if I had a set top cable box - saved money :)
The Aux adapter allowed me to input my old VCR and video recorder input the computer, via the HVR-2250
The video software included, WinTV7, is OK and uses the new tv format standard .TS, but does not include a Electronic Programming Guide to schedule program recording; so I had to use Microsoft Media Center. However Media Center now records TV in a strange format (.WTV) which is hard to convert (I have Windows 7 so I can right click on the .WTV file and convert it to the old DVR-MS file)

The HVR-2250 card is GREAT, wish Microsoft wouldn't try to re-invent the world with their new recording format.

Terrible picture quality; PC resource hog

Customer Rating:
I don't normally write reviews on products but I can't remain silent and let other customers have the same distasteful experience that I've had with this product.

First, my setup:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
2GB DDR2 RAM
ASUS P5B-E Motherboard
MSI ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card with 512MB of RAM
Windows XP SP3
HP w2558 hc, 25.5", 1920 X 1200 resolution monitor

Years ago I had enjoyed one of Hauppage's analog TV tuners. With the advent of over-the-air HDTV broadcasts I more recently upgraded to the ATI TV Wonder 650. Because ATI had no Win 7 driver support, I thought that I'd be stepping it up a notch by upgrading to this product for my new build that I'm about to do. Needless to say, in trying it out on my old XP system I was sorely disappointed in this product and Hauppauge as a whole.

My biggest complaint is the picture quality. I thought that with the constant advancement of technology and from the raving reviews I had read online that I was to see an improvement in picture quality over my aging ATI 650. Boy was I wrong. The only time the picture even looks halfway decent is when you have it shrunk into a small corner of you monitor. Don't even bother trying to watch 1080i ATSC broadcasts in full screen mode--dropped frames, jerky movement, jaggies, blurring, pixelation and just a general lack of quality are what you see. Having used my ATI card for years I was used to a better quality picture and the difference was stark.

My other beef with this product is how apparently inefficiently it does its job. Opening task manager and looking at how this tuner's associated processes ate up my system's resources was quite amazing. For example, my ATI 650 averaged around 15% CPU usage while watching 1080i ATSC programs. This product is around 25-50% and both cores go to work. Besides that, installing this product parks on your PC two processes named "CAPTUR~3.EXE" that suck up 97 and 83 MB of RAM, respectively, whether you have the WIN TV program open or not. I understand that they each correspond to a tuner processor and are there to enable the product to "wake up" and record a scheduled program, but a constant 200 MB drain seems wasteful. For those not having powerful computers this product will give them a lot of slowdown.

I won't even get into the issues I have with the software, as the above was enough to convince me to return this product post haste, despite taking the 15% open box return fee. Better to cut my losses now then have to endure this shoddy piece of hardware--this literal eyesore any longer. If this is their top-of-the-line product I'd hate to see their lesser offerings.

Good card, could be better

Customer Rating:
When I first installed the software & drivers I had several issues, the card stopped working after waking the computer up, the WinTV7 wasn't working properly, I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling everything several times.

After downloading the software updates from the hauppauge website, most of the problems were fixed, still have some bugs, but is working much better. The auxiliary A/V panel came with mini-jack ports for the audio, I first thought those were RCA ports by looking at some pictures on the internet.

The remote control is just good for me, haven't give any problems yet, and the TV card works very well with the Windows 7 Media Center. Right now I'm running Windows 7 64 bits and using it with analog cable TV.

What I find really annoying is the lag created when changing the channel, it takes around 2 seconds to be able to see the picture because of the encoding, is not much but I'm used to a faster response. This was improved on a WinTV 7 update by adding some hauppague codecs that makes it a little bit faster, but on MCE you'll probably have to mess with the registry to get that fixed. That gets worst if you're planning to plug a device such as a DVD into the auxiliary A/V, you'll definitely notice the lag when using the DVD remote control.

PCI-TV

Customer Rating:
Works great with Windows media Center on Windows 7. I had to load the WinTV though to record video off the VCR, which is why I purchase the card. Pinnacle Studio was not compatible with this product to allow import direct fromt he PCI card, therefore, I had to use the WinTV to record the VCR tape, WinTV then converted it to a JPM format that I could import into Pinnacle Studio to render to a DVD disk. All in all, the product is excellent.