Product Description

CONSUMER ALERT: This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009, to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation's transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products. For more information, call the Federal Communications Commission at 1-888-225-5322 (TTY: 1-888-835-5322) or visit the Commission's digital television website at: www.dtv.gov HAUPPAUGE PVR-250 - WinTV PVR-250 puts TV watching under your control! Watch what you want, when you want with this easily installed PCI adapter. Supports data rates from 1Mbit/sec to 12Mbits/sec - you decide how to factor picture quality against hard disk space! Includes WinTV-Scheduler and WinTV-Editor With WinTV-PVR's Pause feature enjoy personal instant replay to analyze key scenes Requires 450 MHz+ Pentium II class processor running Windows 98SE, ME, 2000 or XP, free PCI slot, sound card, CD-RW or DVD writer for burning Video CDs, S-VCDs or DVDs

Product Details

• Brand: Hauppauge
• Model: 980
• Format: AVI
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

Features

• Watch TV on your PC screen, in a window or full screen
• Digitally record your TV shows or pause live TV and create your own instant replay
• Burn captured programming onto CD-ROM or DVD (optional media burner required)
• Integrated 125 channel cable-ready TV tuner, hardware MPEG-2 encoder, dbx stereo audio with IR remote control, batteries and manul
• Composite Video, S-Video & audio inputs, for connecting VCR or camcorder

From the Manufacturer
The WinTV-PVR-250 brings live TV to your PC screen. With it's 125-channel cable ready TV receiver, you can watch TV in a resizeable window or full screen while you work on your PC.

WinTV-PVR puts TV watching under your control! Watch what you want, when you want! With WinTV-PVR you can pause TV when you want, create your own instant replay and even burn your TV shows and home videos onto CD-ROM or DVD!

Want to make your PC a Digital VCR? The WinTV-PVR-250, with the built-in hardware MPEG2 encoder, can take your home video tapes and turn them into high quality MPEG videos. The you can author and burn DVD's, VideoCD's or S-VideoCD's. WinTV-PVR-250 includes the excellent ULead DVD Movie Factory to author your digital videos.

With WinTV-PVR-250 you can:

• Watch TV in a window on your PC screen (any size), or watch TV full screen!
• Record your home videos and TV shows to disk using MPEG compression. The built-in hardware MPEG encoder allows you to continue to use your computer while recording. Surf the net or answer e-mail while digitally recording to your PC's hard disk!
• Schedule your TV recordings with WinTV-Scheduler. The Electronic Program Guides TitanTV.com in the U.S., TVTV.de in Europe and iEPG in Japan, are Internet based program guides which work with WinTV-PVR to help schedule your TV recordings
• Pause and instantly replay your TV shows, with 2X and 8x digital fast forward and rewind
• Capture high quality still video images from live or recorded TV
• Edit your TV shows or home videos with the Hauppauge MPEG Editor
• With the included DVD MovieFactory, you can author your home videos onto CD or DVD WinTV-PVR-250 includes WinTV-Scheduler, which can schedule TV watching and recording on a daily, weekly or random schedule. Never miss those old favorite shows broadcast in the middle of the night! We support the TitanTV Electronic Program Guide in North America (see www.titantv.com for more information), plus TVTV in Europe and iEPG in Japan.

WinTV-PVR's Pause feature gives you control of what you watch in your WinTV window. Get personal "instant replay" to stop the action when you want to analyze a key scene. Instantly rewind to any point and replay the action again. You're in control with WinTV-PVR! Ever been called to the phone, had to answer the door, or went for a snack and missed the big play? With WinTV-PVR, you'll never miss the action again. Just click on WinTV-PVR's "One Touch Pause" button to pause your TV show, click again to continue watching where you left off. Then skip through commercials as you catch up to the live broadcast.

Record your home videos and TV shows using high quality MPEG and play them back on your PC or home DVD player! The WinTV-PVR250's Record button allow you to record your TV shows or home video to your PC's hard disk and play them back at any time. Then use your PC's CD-RW burner or DVD burner to create Video CD's, S-VCD's or DVD's, with up to one hour of TV video. Video CD's can be played on your PC or laptop computer, or on your home DVD player (see our web site for a complete list of tested compatible DVD players). Record TV show episodes to CD-RW disks, and then watch them on your laptop when you travel. Or play them through your DVD player in your living room.

WinTV-PVR can put your home videos onto DVD or CD-ROM instead. Five DVD's (with 10 hours of high quality video) or Video CD's (with 5 hours of VHS quality video) can be stored in the space of one video tape on your video shelf. And when you want to mail a video to a friend, you can slip them into an envelope. Try to do that with videotape!

WinTV-PVR-250 uses a new integrated MPEG1/MPEG2 encoder, the Conexant -016,which compresses your videos 100:1 whithout slowing down your PC's processor and while providing great on-screen video quality. WinTV-PVR-250 can record full screen TV using 2 GB of hard disk space per hour. With WinTV-PVR-250, you can also create Video CD's, saving up to an hour of video on a single CD-RW disk and playing them on your home DVD player. You can also create S-VideoCD's, which allows up to 1/2hour of MPEG2 quality video on a CD-RW disk.

If you have one of the new DVD+RW or DVD-R burners, you can record your TV shows (or home videos!) with WinTV-PVR-250 and burn them onto DVD. The WinTV-PVR-250 has been tested with MyDVD, DVD-It and ULead's DVD MovieFactory, popular DVD burning applications.

Customer Reviews

Great card for a HTPC
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.

Good card - Software needs work
I bought this card mainly to transfer the contents of some old VHS video tapes to DVD. It did not take much work getting the card installed and running but the software has some glitches. It is intuitive and easy to use but sometimes for some unknown reason it will freeze up. This is easily recified by doing the old Ctrl-Alt-Delete routine to end the program but it is annoying. The program will freeze up and need to be restarted at least twice an hour. You cannot use any other software to interface with this card. I tried 3 different video editing programs with no success before I went to the manufacturer's website. They have a section on there where they tell you that the card will only work with the software that came with it. Even the slimmed down Ulead Movie Factory Toolkit that came in the software package cannot interface with the card directly. That was a little disappointing. The WinTV software does work and I am satisfied with the quality of video that I am able to capture and save with it and the card. Hence my rating of 4 stars.

There is one other strange issue that I have had. I'm not sure if it is the card or a coincidence but you might want to watch out for this. My husband has several video games installed on the machine. Shortly after we installed this capture card, a few of those games stopped working properly. The games would run and we could hear sound but the graphics would not display. No amount of tinkering, reinstalling etc could fix the problem.

Great PVR card, software has some issues
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.