<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Not designed for your living room
Review: I bought this TV Tuner with the expectation that it would make my computer a good replacement for a TV with a PVR, but it barely comes close. I'm writing this review with an emphasis on its PVR functionality because you can get several significantly cheaper cards (under [$$$]) without that feature.One necessarily has to use bundled software (WinTV 2000) with this card because the programming interface to the hardware video encoder has been kept proprietary by Hauppauge. These are just some of the annoying quirks with this software. - if you hit the pause button to pause live TV, the program gets out of fullscreen mode about 10-15 seconds, and then returns to fullscreen mode. I find this quite interruptive. - if you have muted the sound and you happen to switch between fullscreen and windowed mode (intentionally, or unintentionally for the above reason), the sound gets turned on again for a few moments which can be quite startling if for example you are on the phone. - if the software crashes for whatever reason while you are in PVR mode, the hard disk keeps being continuously accessed and one has to reboot the computer. At times, the spinning disk prevents the operating system from shutting down within a reasonable length of time. - hibernation is not supported once you install this card - unlike a Tivo, this card can not decode digital cable channels. You have to use a cable-TV box and you cannot use the card to change channels. This also means that you cannot record programs unattended (unless you have a single program to record and you leave the cable box tuned to that channel). - closed captioning does not work in recorded programs or while in PVR mode. Also, the captions appear in big black opaque boxes overlaid on the video and there is no other way to view them. - color (brightness, contrast etc) adjustment controls do not work while in PVR mode. - the program does not startup smoothly. You first hear the TV sound for a second, followed by a few seconds silence before you see normal TV again. - while in PVR mode, the program constantly keeps writing to disk even though you aren't timeshifting the video yet. Thus, they have provided a separate non-PVR mode and, in my opinion, unnecessarily complicated the usage of this device. I must say that the normal TV tuner features of this card are very satisfactory. However, I find myself using the PVR features quite much less frequently than I would have liked. The extra [$$$] paid for the PVR features does not feel completely worth it.
<< 1 >>
| 
