Rating: 
Summary: Great PVR card, software has some issues
Review: Ok, I bought this used off of ebay, so I didn't pay the retail price, so anything negative I say about the card might be more of an issue if I'd paid retail for it.
The drivers for the PVR-250 have issues. If you have any kind of software DVD decoder on your system, such as PowerDVD or WinDVD, the PVR software doesn't play nice with them (the CPU usage jumps to 100% and the computer stops responding) -- you have to uninstall everything, then install updated drivers that work better with the DVD player. I ended up having a lot of software conflicts and decided just to wipe my hard drive and reinstall XP. That being said, everything works fine now :) but if you're not very techno-savvy and don't have a lot of patience, you might take this back to the store.
Now that those caveats are out of the way -- I love this card. The recordings it makes are high quality, you can select the quality/compression level you want to use, you can even do lower-bitrate (ca 1.4Mb/s) MPEG-1 captures with DVD-compliant audio (48KHz) and put 6 hours on a rewritable DVD. The higher-quality full-res MPEG-2 captures are also very good, which come in handy for recording stuff I want to keep. I primarily bought this card for time-shifting stuff, though.
The timer recording software is SUPERB. If you set the WinTV app to mute the volume while it's recording, it records your programs very unobtrusively. I haven't tried the TitanTV scheduling yet, but it's supposed to be integrated -- point, click, record.
My only real complaint about the recordings this card and the software make is that the MPEG files have to be remultiplexed for VCD/SVCD before they're burnable. It adds an extra minute or two to the burning process. In the grand scheme of things, this ain't a big deal, but it is worth mentioning.
--UPDATE: SIX WEEKS AFTER ORIGINAL REVIEW -- after owning this card for about six weeks, I have to recommend getting a third-party software solution instead of using Hauppauge's software. I had a lot of crashes using WinTV's software -- including programs I really wanted recorded. I now use Frey Technology's Sage Recorder, it's a no-frills, inexpensive Java-based PVR software package. Highly recommended, works great with the PVR-250.
Rating:
Summary: Good capture card...bad software
Review: The capture card itself it's that bad. It does the job. The problem is the bundled softwares that come with it. They are a little buggy even if you are using the lastest versions. It's best to find your own video editing programs. You can use theirs but you may get errors every once in awhile. I'm using XP by the way.I've also noticed that the driver can get corrupted after awhile. What will happen is the video will get very pixelated. To fix it all I did was reinstall the driver. It's a good idea to get the lastest drivers from their website if you are having problems. All in all, I would get this card again. It's a good deal for the price and you don't have to fill up your AGP slot like some of the all in one cards. This way you can get the best graphics card for your AGP slot and leave the video capture to a dedicated card. I still don't like the buggy software but the average user probably won't notice many problems. If you do a lot of video editing then I would recommend finding better software. The card itself is worth the money.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for slow-ish machines
Review: The Hauppauge software is another one of those ugly applications that takes over the whole machine and don't play nice. No problem if you have a P4 class and a modern AGP video card and 266 FSB or better, else it overwhelms your box. For a stand-alone PVR application the scheduler doesn't close itself after finishing recording (or going idle would be nice) and it prevents your box for going back to sleep, kinda of a bad thing if you leave your box on 24x7.
Rating:
Summary: Software has issues
Review: The included software has issues. The versions on the CD that comes with the package will NOT work with Windows 2000. You have to get the latest versions off of their website to get this to work. The included TV sofware caches 1-2 seconds to the hard drive and plays back from that. This renders it nearly impossible to play console video games on it and also causes severe playback issues if you have a slow hard drive, like I do. My biggest issue is that the audio and video get out of sink very easily. If I watch TV in full screen mode, then the audio and video will get out of sink within a couple of minutes. This should not happen, no matter how slow my hard drive is. It is easy to use to record programs, and the recording is excelent, but that just doesn't make up for software that doesn't even play the TV right.
Rating:
Summary: Great card for a HTPC
Review: This is probably the best quality tv card you can buy for the money. Picture is clear and crisp with no dropped frames, and is much better than previous ATI and Hauppauge tuner cards that I have used. The included Hauppauge software is crap, and their software has always been crap since when I first used it 7 years ago (Its the SAME application!). Its buggy and slow and has a very non-intuitive interface. Be sure to grab Snapstream BeyondTV, SageTV, MythTV or basically ANYTHING else and you will be pleasantly surprised by the difference. Performance-wise this card is much better than the cheaper TV cards that do not include a MPEG encoder. Using an ATI TV Wonder I would routinely get 30-50% CPU usage when recording programs at fair quality on my 1.3Ghz CPU. The PVR 250 uses less than 5% CPU while recording at much higher quality. Don't be fooled into buying the more expensive PVR-350. The only difference is the included MPEG decoder/tv-out on the 350. Its sounds like a good idea but unfortunately the decoder really only works with Hauppauge's software (and maybe SageTV) leaving you locked into using their crappy software. Besides the decoding process only uses 30-40% CPU for me and since the encoding uses basically no CPU it does not cause dropped frames while doing PVR decoding/encoding timeshifting activites. The included remote (gray version) is "adequate" and contains most of the needed buttons. A plus is that is also works with the other PVR applications I have tried: BeyondTV and SageTV include native support for it. Unfortunately the range is really short and I can't get it to work more than about 7 ft away from the receiver, but it is better than nothing. Bottom line: If you're building a serious Home Theater PC you should consider this card. Even though it costs more than double the cheapest tv card you could find, the quality and performance more than make up for the cost.
On the other hand if you're just planning on watching TV on your computer or digitizing some old VHS tapes you have lying around, this card is probably overkill as you won't benefit as much from the hardware MPEG encoder and there are cards out there that have better software packages and remotes for less money.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the ultimate PVR solution.
Review: This is the ultimate PVR solution. I have digital cable and wanted to record shows but watch something else. This solves that problem perfect. I have a huge hard drive and when I get the time I cut out the commercials and burn the shows to DVD. I can then watch them on my big screen TV and the quality is just as good as regular TV. Analog channels aren't the best, but digital rocks. Now I want to get a HD Solution.
I couldn't be happier!
I did have some driver conflicts, but I expected that. So I reformatted the system and updated the sata driver's as well as all the other drivers.
My System
GA-7NNXP, 2.8GHz AMD Barton, 1.5GB DC RAM, SONY DL 8X DVD-RW, ATI RADEON 9700, WinTV PVR 250, WD 36GB RAPTOR, WD SATA 250GB, Beyond TV 3.5, USB-UIRT IR Blaster....Ext...
Rating:
Summary: What A Product
Review: What a product - I have successfully taken hours and hours and hours of home video played it through the VCR and captured them to disk and written them to CD and DVD. Basically WinTV allow you to watch TV on you PC, either in a window or full screen. You can digitally record you TV shows or pause live TV and create you own instant replay (at this point the TV program is written to disk). You can also burn TV programs onto CD-ROM or DVD. With the "nanoPEG Editor", you can trim your videos, cut out segments, put them back together, without losing any video quality. The editor also let you to remultiplex for VCD and SVCD. The "WinTV Scheduler" allow you to control TV recording on a daily, weekly or a random schedule. The Ulead "DVD MovieFactory" for authoring and burning Video CD's, SVCD's or DVDs. Feature include:
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-125-channel cable ready TV tuner
-Composite/s-video and audio inputs, to connect to VCR or camcorders
-High quality MPRG-2 video and audio encoder
-Bundled software including WinTV2000 for TV watching and recording, MPEG editor, TV scheduler and DVD/VCD/SVCD authoring and burning software.
-Watch TV in a resizable window or the whole screen
-Capture high quality still video images, up to 1600x1200 pixels in BMP, TIF and JPEG formats
-Remote Control System Requirement:
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-Pentium II processor 450MHz or faster for TV pause with full screen playback
-MS Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP
-Free PCI slot -Sound Card
-CD-RW or DVD writer for burning Video CD's S-VCD's or DVD's
Rating:
Summary: Excellent quality+price combination!
Review: While the software was nothing spectacular, the quality of this hardware is top. Unlike less expensive cards, this does the converting of analog video to digital video all by itself, so it doesn't slow down your system at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Does not worth the money
Review: WinTV-PVR-250 has the folling problems:
1. Remote control has design defect. You can not switch to full screen using remote control. Only several buttons work - more than half of the buttons on remote control do not work. The remote control is not sensitive - you need wait 2 second to switch the channel.
2. No closed caption support.
3. Very hard to install - you have to search the web and find the driver for you windows xp MCE.
In a word, It does not worth the money.
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