( 21 reviews )
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Posted: May 15 2009
I have old Hi8 tapes to convert to DVD, record to your hard drive and burn a disc. Sounds good.. right? Wrong!! The video image jumps and flickers a lot, I end up getting a Toshiba DVD player/recorder for about the same price and that worked great!! No problems with the TV tuner. Video works good if I use a DVD to play into video card... Ha Ha Ha
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Posted: Apr 28 2009
So, I purchased this card solely with the intention of recording video from external A/V sources, and have not hooked it up to a cable signal, so I can't comment on that. My system is fairly top end (at least it was when I built it about 9 months ago) - Core 2, 4GB Ram, 8800GTS, etc. This is the ONLY piece of hardware I have had any problem installing in at least the last 5 years. First off, the included CD, when you go to install the software for XP (because unless you have XP MCE you do NOT have software to view TV already), would not install the software. Drivers installed fine, but the installer would insist no software installation was necessary. Downloading the most up to date install CD from the manufacturer's site resolved this problem. As for the actual quality of the software (WinTV), I have no clue what passes for quality control at Hauppauge, but good lord spellcheck your UI! The software overall feels low quality and reminds me of software from the early Win95 days. The software works fine, but really lacks any sort of polish. Somewhere also in the installation, my sound card stopped working (Realtek onboard sound on a Gigabyte P35-D53L). Probably a quirk to my system, but I was unsuccessful in reviving my sound card (full driver uninstall, driver clean sweep in safe mode, reinstall, etc). In the end, I had to reformat my OS drive and start from a fresh windows install - although this is probably due to a specific issue on my system. Just wanted to mention it. Anyways, the performance seems good, works as advertised, but the quirks of getting it running on XP and the polish of the included software are frankly completely out of line with modern hardware. I imagine on a Vista system with MCE where only the drivers are required, this is a great card. XP users beware though!
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Posted: Apr 3 2009
I like how the card will capture video and encode to MPEG-2, DVD-quality on-the-fly. It also saves time on the backend when the CPU doesn't have to work as hard to transcode the video for burning to disc It's a great card for capturing those old videos. No complaints on the TV tuner, either; it's just that TWC Akron doesn't support digital broadcast through their cables. So, It's my problem. Analog cable only for me.
