Hauppauge 1192 WinTV HVR-1950 External USB HDTV Tuner/Video Recorder by HAUPPAUGE
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Digital camera reviews of Hauppauge 1192 WinTV HVR-1950 External USB HDTV Tuner/Video Recorder
Digital camera Review: I tried with this one really i did
Summary: 1 Stars
I come from a tech background so i am a little forgiving of software issues and willing to do 'some' experimentation to get the gizmo to work. I installed on a toshiba laptop (A215-S4817) turion 64 processor and ATI Radeon® X1200 128MB graphics.
Initial experience was the wintv7 app wouldn't run with any constancy, locked up the computer so thoroughly that only a 10 sec power button press would shut it down. CPU load was about 60% for high def.
Then i wiped this computer and reloaded it with no apps other than wintv and the drivers for the device. Worked quite a bit better after this, and i nearly though i was satisfied but i still had the occasional lockup. Also with a weak signal wintv would frequently quit working, a channel change to a stronger station and then back to the original would clear it up. Had some recording i was trying to make just lock up and stop after 30 min of recording with no obvious reason.
Final straw was when i plugged the unit into another USB port and my mouse into the one i usually plugged the tuner into. It all went to crap then and it looked like yet another wintv/driver install would be required. Sadly i will never get a chance to try this because at this point i was on edge and the unit didn't survive the confrontation.
Side note i have one of the PCI bus tuner cards for a desktop and like it.
Suspect the main problem is the USB transfer with high def. I dunno...
Digital camera Review: INCLUDES ANTANEA
Summary: 4 Stars
Despite the graphic in the pictures describing the differences between the Hauppauge models saying that this version (HVR-1950) does not include an antanea, it does and there IS one included for use for over the air HDTV (which is good, it also includes an FM radio antanea as well). The hardware encoder in the square white "box" does its job and i can not even tell that recording is taking place while i am using my (rather old) computer. In addition, I have no video card (just intel graphics accelerator that came w/ the laptop and a 2.0 GHZ dual core Intel chip) and although I did not meet the 64 MB graphics requirement, things still function just fine on this computer (although a previous Pinnacle brand USB TV tuner with their software would not). However, the negative is that a 2 minute recording takes up 250 MB of space!! That is about 7.5 GB per hour (not 5.0 GB per hour), making it really tough for this to function as a home DVR give the space requirements (unless you have tons of spare space or have an attached usb external drive, which i assume would work). Finally, I was confused (maybe it's obvious) but the "SoftPVR" is just saying that the Hauppauge device uses your computer's CPU to make recordings, while the versions with an onboard encoder use the CPU in the Hauppauge device to make the recordings freeing up your computer's CPU, but there is no difference in the end recording itself or the amount of space it takes, just the way it is created.Digital camera Review: Image isn't great quality
Summary: 3 Stars
I bought this to replace a tv tuner that cost half as much as this one. My hope is that the picture quality would be better. Unfortunately, its the same as the old one, they just added the external recording computer. There is nothing wrong with this item, its just not worth the extra money.Digital camera Review: Just minor issues
Summary: 5 Stars
This product is amazing. I had a Pinnacle DVD recorder (DVC 100) that I bought for $50 and worked once. It was for Win XP and I had Vista. There were "drivers" for Vista but did not seem to help. The after doing some research I found this device and I love it. I currently have Windows 7 Professional (I got it before the release thanks to my university) and the installation was painless. Unlike other reviewer I didn't have a problem finding the drivers on the manufacturer's website, but just in case. http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_wintv7.html
This devices work perfectly with Windows Media Center. But if you're going to record something through the composite (RCA) inputs, you need to download/install WinTV. The one that comes in the CD is version 6. I didn't install it. I downloaded version 7 instead.
I did have some problems since I installed the drivers and used it with Media Center first, then I downloaded WinTV and just installed the application without reinstalling the driver. This caused WinTV to keep crashing. I uninstalled it, re-installed the drivers (from the downloaded file) and then installed WinTV and no problems.
There is lag when recording through the composite inputs but you just need a few splitters and problem solved, the recorded video was smooth although when there is no sound you can still hear a little static, kinda like an old tube TV but it's not very noticeable. Still I think this is is an awesome product and highly recommend it.
OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Version 6.1.7600 Build 7600
System Manufacturer Dell Inc.
System Model Inspiron 1420
System Type X86-based PC
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz, 2201 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB
Hard Disk Drive 115 GB of 148 GB free
Digital camera Review: Just one constraint
Summary: 4 Stars
The product is very good but I would love to see video component input instead of only svideo or RCA.