Hauppauge Personal Video Recorder WinTV-PVR 500 MCE White box PCI Interface

Pros: Card is easy to install and works great with MythTV setups.

Cons: I have none.

Other Thoughts: I use this card with a DISH sat via SVideo recording. I'm very happy with results.

Pros: Nothing good about my short time owning this product.

Cons: Had a capacitor missing, didn't bother to try it without it, now knowing whether the card would overhead and damage my computer.

It also came perhaps too tightly packed in the white box.

I'm out over $20 for the shipping costs.

Other Thoughts: New egg sent me a card with a capacitor clearly knocked off. I send it ground shipping across the US for a replacement and by the time it arrived (taking nearly a week) they were out of stock.

Pros: It works, I think its a great buy. Hauppauge makes the best TV tuners from what I have read.

Cons: You need windows xp media centre edition, or Vista with the correct addons. I didn't know this so i use mythTV with Ubuntu

Other Thoughts: I can't play video games on it, there is too big of a lag. I am not sure if it is the hardware or software but I cant get it to work on mythtv or beyondTV,

Pros: works excelent, had no trouble installing this board in computer and installing the drivers was easy to do, it does a great job doing the video recording of video to file saves for future viewing

Cons: you will need a media software, such as beyond-tv to view the tv or line inputs of the tunners

Other Thoughts: none

Pros: Excelent product. Have the samsung tuners and no problem at all.Have tried sage tv and beyond tv. both are great tv applications and work really well. Using xp home.Easy to install drivers. Got updated drivers from the hauppauge website. Easy to follow instructions.If you have a bad picture, check your input signal strength.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Wish it was digital

Pros: Bought for my HTPC with Mediaportal, works fine under XP with a Firefly RF remote.

Cons: Pricey

Other Thoughts: No one can persuade me that celeriac is tasty.

Pros: I have owned several TV tuner cards in the past, including an older Hauppauge single tuner card that worked well at the time, but this card really is an excellent piece of hardware. My system has gone through several upgrades over the last two years since purchasing this card including RAM CPU and Video Card, but even when I was running a Beyond TV 3.5 on XP Pro with a single core 1.8 Ghz Athlon 64, and 1GB of RAM, the recording and playback performance was flawless. One of the notable differences between this card and all other cards I had owned previously, was the CPU utilization during use, even while recording 2 programs at the same time, this can be attributed to the 2 on-board Connexant MPEG-2 encoding processors, once the video stream has been encoded, all the OS/CPU have to do is playback the video.

Cons: Pros continued: Now that I'm running a Dual core 2.0Ghz Athlon, and 2GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate, I won't dig into Vista's shortcomings, but the Media Center in Vista is solid, and this card is discovered automatically, drivers and all, and is a snap to configure (since there is virtually no configuration, just run the setup wizard in media center.

Now to the Cons:
Errrr..... Uhhhh..... It's not free, or particularly cheap (but definitely worth the asking price). However I do get what looks like some interference or distortion on channel 54, in the form of diagonal lines across the entire screen (present most of the time, not always but most of the time). Other than that noting for the last TWO YEARS.

Other Thoughts: Highly recommended for anyone trying to setup an HTPC (Home Theater PC).

Pros: - Two tuners from one cable input
- Vista MCE recognized it immediately (and recognized both tuners)
- Picture quality is superb
- Recording two shows at once takes 1% from a AMD 3800+ X2. I can literally record two shows with this card and play any game without any lag or drop in recording quality.

Cons: Needs a third tuner... ?

None really

Other Thoughts: Although it looks like it needs two cable inputs, it only needs one. The other input is for the FM tuner.

Pros: Works great at capturing two video feeds. I'm using with BeyondTV and they work well together.

Cons: Works good if you can get it to install correctly. I've owned a PVR250 and a now a PVR500 and each ones software and drivers install rather rough.

Pros: When it works, picture quality is excellent, recording functionality works well, and it integrates seamlessly into Vista Ultimate's Media Center

Cons: However, if you have Windows Vista 64 bit (any version) DO NOT GET THIS CARD. There is little good driver support from Hauppauge. You will have extremely flaky performance, and you will be basically staring at either a "No Signal" screen in Media Center or a Green Screen with extremely jumpy picture and sound.

Other Thoughts: When it works, it's great, when it doesn't, life sucks. I've had enough "fun" dealing with this card and I'm looking for a different TV Tuner.