Better than most other products at this price.
Written: Jan 26 '04 (Updated Dec 16 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Hardware compression is wonderful. Capture and viewing software are primitive, but at least they're reliable.
Cons: Bundled editing software was useless. Occasional hiccups in live TV.
The Bottom Line: Hardware compression greatly improves capture quality. Software is dumb, but works without crashing, more than I can say for many competing products.
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| tcchou71's Full Review: Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 (980) TV/Video Input |
I've spent the last 2 weeks looking for the best TV/capture card and software. This was the best of the cards I tried, for 2 main reasons:
1. Hardware compression lets you record high quality MPEGs (720x480 resolution, near DVD quality) with relatively little load on the processor. With other cards, my computer became very sluggish, even though it has a moderately fast processor (2.2 GHz P4-compatible Celeron).
2. The basic viewing/recording software worked reliably almost out of the box. I had only one installation problem, which was fixed in short order by updating my audio drivers. Other cards I tried (TV Wonder VE, Radeon 9000, and Pinnacle PCTV) had serious bugs, incompatibilities and/or instabilities that forced me to return those products. The software integrates well with TitanTV, a website that gives you a TV grid that you can click on to view or record programs.
3. This card works GREAT with SnapStream's Beyond TV software. This is probably the best software of its kind on the market, and the combination of the two are truly capable of replacing your TV and VCR. I can't say enough about this combination.
Although this is one of the better products I've tried, it still has several problems that limit its usefulness:
1. Software is rudimentary. Scheduler can't handle back-to-back scheduled recordings - I had to manually insert a 1-minute gap to record abutting programs. Close captions are not supported, although Hauppauge claims this will be added someday. You can pause live TV, but about 2-3 seconds of TV will be lost when this feature first starts up.
2. The bundled video editing software was so buggy as to be unusable. The card comes with a stripped down version of Ulead, which turns captured MPEGs into DVD or VCD format. But the program corrupted my audio, making it completely unusable. You also get nanoPEG, a basic editor for cutting/joining MPEGs. It too was unusable, refusing to cut my video in the correct locations.
3. When recording and watching simultaneously, the live picture "hiccups" every minute or two, skipping ahead or behind a split second or so. The recorded file is always perfect, thankfully.
4. Card does not allow access to the raw (uncompressed) video. Even when watching live TV, the card compresses the signal to MPEG, and the computer decodes it again. Hence, minor compression artifacts (e.g. "blocking") are present even during live TV. They only bother me on noisy or snowy channels.
5. Some excellent state-of-the-art third-party TV console/capture programs (e.g. DScaler) don't work with this card. There appears to be no way to bypass the hardware MPEG2 encoder and use other software encoders (e.g. DivX). This card does work with SnapStream, which I like a lot, and ShowShifter, which is also pretty good. It's also compatible with SageTV, which I hate but which some others seem to like.
All in all, this is one of the better cards out there, because of the hardware compression and the stable viewing and capture software. Despite the shortcomings, I use this card a lot, and it's capture quality is so handy that I no longer even own a VCR.
If you buy this card (or any other for that matter), you will probably have to buy third-party recording and capture software because the bundled stuff is limited. The two that I liked the best were ShowShifter and Snapstream's Beyond TV. Both worked well, and cost about $50.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tcchou71
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Member: Elephant Seal
Location: Baltimore, MD
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
I'm a behavioral neuroscientist/psychologist. The giant animal in the photo is an elephant seal.
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