Hauppauge 1178 WinTV-HVR-1600 Internal Hybrid TV Tuner/Video Recorder

Beware buying any Hauppauge product for Windows Vista. Everything works except for Record, which crashes. The hardware may be good, but the software/driver seems to have been an afterthought.

I installed this device into a airly powerful desktop with plenty of RAM and a 256 Mb Video card. The images were ok, a little jerky, but not really watchable. This may, however, be more user error than hardware quality...

i bought this with the thought of having a higher quality tuner card for DVR purposes. I already have a $20 Sabrent that i use for broadcasting to pick up the signal from the internet. The Sabrent actually blows this tuner away. For some reason the Hauppauge does not have the power to convert as clean a signal as the $20 Sabrent. I will be returning this item.

I give the card 4 stars and the software 2.5 stars, for an overall rating of 4 stars.

Card produces great picture quality. I am using an old outdoor antenna plus a 20db to 30db adjustable amplifier from Radio Shack. I only got about 4 channels without the amplifier and between 28 to 50 channels with the amplifier. I bought a big new HDTV antenna, but I need to install it outdoors, because it doesn't work well enough indoors. HDTV is way better than analog. The picture quality is perfect and much higher resolution.

You need a reasonably powerful computer to handle this card. At first I was using a PC with an Athlon XP 1800+ CPU and Radeon 9700 card. I could watch HDTV on this, but there was some occasional lagging or stuttering of the video. It was not quite fast enough of a computer. Then I tried to upgrade the CPU, and ended up killing the computer. So I built a brand new computer with really high specs! My new PC has a Athlon 64 X2 5600+ cpu, 2gb Corsair ram, and EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card. Now it handles the HDTV very easily. I can even play a recorded video at the same time as I have the HDTV running.

The WinTV software works, but it is lacking a couple of things. First of all, it will not adjust the proportion of the picture to your monitor. When you watch in full screen mode, it just stupidly stretches the whole picture to cover your entire monitor. I use a 16/10 proportion widescreen monitor. Therefore all the 16/9 and 4/3 tv shows are stretched out of proportion in full screen mode. Also, the timer recording software does not work! That is, when I try to schedule shows for recording, that just doesn't work. I bought a WinTV card a few years ago and I returned it because the software was utter crap and would not even install properly. This new WinTV software is far better, but it still needs improvement for the above reasons! Why do they insist on releasing good hardware with inadequate software? Is it so hard or expensive to create decent software with complete functionality? I doubt it! I used to do computer programming, and I think with just a little more effort they could've made this software complete. I'm not asking for some super fancy software, I just want something with a complete set of basic functions that I need! Another problem was that they don't give you any software to play your recorded HDTV programs! You can record them, but not play them with your WinTV software! So I had to find software that would play these big HDTV files. So I got VLC (a free program) to play the files. It works great. I also got the BeyondTV software to watch HDTV. I use that one most of the time instead of the WinTV software. BeyondTV shows all the programs in correct proportion on my 16/10 monitor in full screen mode. Also, the BeyondTV timer scheduling feature actually works and is easy to use. However, BeyondTV has one problem, in that it doesn't have an instant recording feature that works the way I want. So when I need to record something immediately while I watch, then I go back to using WinTV for that. So I am using three different pieces of software for all my TV viewing. I should only have to use ONE and WinTV should have provided that! I haven't tried to do any video editing. The video editing software that comes with WinTV is probably a piece of junk and I haven't tried it yet. I know it has minimal capabilities. Fortunately there is rarely a show that I'd want to edit and keep permanently, but I'm gonna have to find some good software to edit a few important shows and burn them to DVD.

From what I've read and from my own experience, it seems that this card does not have a very sensitive tuner, so it may be difficult for you to get all the available stations. Even with a 30db amplifier, I'm still getting only about 30 stations and some of them are not very strong. I can get 52 stations on my Zenith converter box WITHOUT using an amplifier and all 52 channels are rock solid! I probably will consider getting a better HDTV card eventually, if my new HDTV antenna does not get me all the channels with this card.

Our old Replay TV (Lifetime membership) is still working strong. The only problem with Replay TV is that it won't take a digital Qam signal (or any digital cable/OTA signal). Our goal when buying this card was to timeshift the HD locals.

We tried intensively for four days using the enclosed software, BeyondTV and then SageTV. Although we are computer literate, we could not get this card or the programs to work correctly on XP Pro with AMD 64 x 2 5000 chip. The video card we have installed is also heavy duty.

My little Vizio TV received Qam with no effort and takes 2 minutes to scan. But this card,,,,ugh....took 60 minutes to scan for analog and Qam. We did have the cable split. We did everything right.... but it constantly froze or was unable to map correctly.

After a point we looked at ourselves and said..."All this work just to timeshift the locals on HD?"

Better to watch the shows on the internet. They are there 24/7 and its free. Darn. Tivo is also out of the running since it won't take Qam and map it correctly either.

I have to say that the engineering is just not there yet for what we wanted. Maybe in a year or two when the demand is there, Hauppauge will develop a better product.

I wish Replay TV was still there and I would upgrade to a digital Replay TV in a heartbeat.