Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 MCE - White Box 1129 PCI-Express x1 Interface

Pros: Worked right away with win media center no config needed

Cons: none... yet

Other Thoughts: Haven't done a lot and win7 media center may have made configuration easier than vista or XP... but I'm not complaining it works.

Pros: It works. It's difficult to tell with a product like this if the so so resolution I get is due to the board or to lousy cable signal from Comcast (which a lot of people seem to complain about) The quality, however, doesn't appear quite as good as when I bypass it and hook the signal straight to the TV.

Cons: I have to split my cable signal and then hook it up to both inputs to get all the stations. Mst be a better way.

Pros: Works great, records HDTV flawlessly.

Cons: Tuner is too big to fit in PCI-E x16 slot on my GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard. The memory slots on the board obstruct completely the usage of this tuner card in the PCI-E x16 slot. Not sure who to blame there, or if the blame is shared equally, however it does suck.

Pros: (I'm using XP-s3 using wintv6 4.8A build)
Nice picture with ATSC and a good antenna. I get 49 channels from three citys from an 8ft beam. Titan TV integrates nicely. Enough options to get by once found. FM is great with supplied antenna when properly installed. Works well with 3rd party apps.

Cons: erratic volume with no equalization, no picture tuning control, slow channel scan, very slow app start-up on cold boot (even 3rd party, gotta be a fix somewhere for that) Needs better XP machine software.

Other Thoughts: It seems the card is best suited for a media center machine. A few of online support forums track down most peeps issues. The picture quality is great for me.

Pros: In linux, I have gotten it to accept analog signals with a 2.6.29.5 kernel. (I think support started in 2.6.27) Haven't tried the digital signals or FM signals. Right now, the analog signal is running with blue and red vertical lines from a Sony Handicam.

The card comes with a simple RCA composite to s-video adapter. So you can accept simple signals from old equipment.

Cons: It runs pretty hot on my system. I mounted an extra fan to blow cool air in between it and the next pci card. Might be linux, but might be everybody, who knows.

Pros: Price/features.

Cons: You have to hook up 2 sourcse, one for digital and the other for analog. Video encoding cannot be trusted, which is part of the reason I bought this! Sometimes the S-VHS VCR shows up, sometimes it's gone.

Other Thoughts: This seemed promising, but the application (not the drive) appears to be a problem. It works one time, then the next there is a .Net issue(Vista 64) that prevents it from working.

The radio will come and it sounds good, after a while, i am not allowed to turn the volume up - only down!

I had a DVICO and that had a good presentation, but it was untable and unrecordable. The encoding, like this only allows fro the transport stream option and not an MPEG or anything else option.

TV recording quality is good BUT, it does not allow you to adjust the quality as it should. There is only one option for encoding quality.

All I want is video encoder that will not crash, shows up and stays up (Had a Nividia WDM VIVO that disappeared too!) and it it has a TV, even better!

I do not know what to do. Hopefully this thing will work well and i am using the WinTV7 on top of that!

Pros: ATSC HD channels look great. When it works. I have very little else to say about "pros".

Cons: Running WinXP on a quad core Intel system. System is extremely fast and otherwise stable, but WinTV crashes every 5 to 15 minutes. Tried V6 and the new V7 from the Hauppauge website. Perhaps this card is functional if youre using Vista Media Center or a 3rd party TV app, but the software provided by Hauppage is simply unacceptable. Changing channels is extremely slow, and the user interface is poorly designed. I have yet to watch an hour long program without a crash. Want to use a 2nd monitor as a TV display? Forget about it, thats an instant crash. Timeshifting? Good luck, you will be incredibly frustrated when the application crashes and you need to restart the program, losing the buffered portion of the show you were trying to watch. I cant receive some major high-power broadcast channels (Namely CBS - Chicago). I have a large directional antenna in clear view of the broadcast towers. Scanning for channels is far slower than my 8 year old Leadtek TV tuner card.

Other Thoughts: Now that the NTSC analog signal is shut off, the analog TV input and hardware encoder is essentially useless (maybe your cable provider still feeds SD analog TV). You'd be better off with dual ATSC tuners. The FM tuner reception is poor, and I dont even try anymore... if you have broadband, just stream it online, its far better than the static youll get with the FM tuner. Also you need to download a separate application to use the FM tuner, its not a part of WinTV. Comcast doesnt pass a single Clear QAM channel, so forget about that. Basically, the only thing this is good for is ATSC digital, so get a cheaper model without the FM, NTSC tuner, and hardware encoder. If youre using WinXP and planning to use the Hauppauge software... I hope you have better luck. If Hauppauge cant fix the constant crashing issue, Ill be requesting a refund (from Hauppauge, not Newegg). Im not willing to invest more money for 3rd party software. This product has been nothing but headaches and frustration.

Pros: Nice tuner card for the money, great support and thoughtful manufacture.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Put this in 10-year-old's HPTC upstairs with windows XP. Needed the front end and had to use WinTv as I cannot get the fancy ones online to work for me. It's decent and it works well.
Drivers installed easily (as always) and I've never had an issue with them (4th build).

Pros: works great on Win 7 64-bit (RC), I use it to watch DishNetwork on my PC. I downloaded the most recent drivers and WinTV7 from the hauppauge website. No installation problems whatsoever.

Cons: This one doesn't come with the remote. Spend the extra ten bucks or so and get the same card with the retail package. It includes the remote.

Other Thoughts: I had to upgrade from my old Hauppauge PVR-250 as it didn't work with 8GB memory/64-bit windows. This works just as good as that one does.

Pros: Excellent QAM reception in Vista Media Center. (see instructions in "Other Thoughts.") Fast channel switching. Great HD picture. Very decent analog reception as well. (haven't used the FM so can't comment on that.)

Cons: Don't bother with Hauppauge's WinTV application. Window's Media Center is much more slick. (However, you must have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate if you want it. Media Center is not included in Home or Business versions of Vista.)

Other Thoughts: The following works on Vista Home Premium:

Download latest drivers from Hauppauge's website and install them. (Don't bother with the drivers on the included CD)
Download and install Microsoft's"Media Center TV Pack 2008" (You may have to search around for it. Microsoft didn't release it to the general public but it can be found on the web)
Download and install Microsoft "PlayReadyPC_X86."
Run Windows updates.
Restart Windows if needed.
After restarting, open the registry editor by clicking the "Start" icon on the task bar, typing "regedit" in the "start search" field and pressing [Enter].

In the registry, navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\HCW85BDA
Add new Folder (key) and name it: Parameters
Add a new DWORD to that and name it: AllowQAM_PowerToy
Make the value for the new string: 1
Restart windows
Make sure a coax TV cable is connected to the bottom connector on the HVR-1800, labeled "antenna."
Load Media Center and go through TV sig