This is a relatively new product and I was skeptical as to whether it would work for me. There were very few reviews to help guide me. I'm happy to say that the tuner card installed easily, the drivers loaded properly, and both tuners (this is a dual tuner card) are functioning with my digital video recording software. I use Beyond TV and wasn't sure that the current version of BTV would recognize this new tuner device. I had some initial concerns in that the Hauppauge software that came with the tuner card wouldn't pick up one of my local channels (the weakest channel in my area). However, the BTV software successfully directed the tuner card to the weak channel and the tuners pull in a sufficiently strong signal for good reception. I'm delighted with this card and would recommend it. Just make sure you have the appropriate slot open in your computer to accept it. Double check the specs for the card and your computer to ensure compatibility. Oh yeah... you can order directly from Hauppauge for less than what Amazon has it priced at. Hauppauge 1229 WinTV-HVR-2250 White Box for System Builders Dual Hybrid PCI-E TV Tuner Board
This thing is pretty sweet. Just connect 1 coax cable and it splits it internaly. I like being able to record 2 shows at once. I watch TV on my big screen, but use this to record my favorite shows and works great, the quality, although not HD over my standard cable connection, is still quite good. My friends brag about having a 100gb Tivo, lol, i have 2Tbs, and can burn em to DVD, hehe. Great card, works perfect on Vista Ultamate 64bit. I use it with Media Center and not the WinTV.
The shipping was super fast and the price is certainly great.
The hardware works great. The wintv software came with it is buggy though, and I had hard time using its channel auto-search. It found all the analog channels but no HDs. I had to look up the physical frequencies online and "tell" it the numbers. With my help it found all the HD channels but the recording went wrong every 20-30 minutes (it would time shift back 5 minutes once in a while so you get part of the show twice and lost some other parts). And I couldn't get the tv guide to work. After tried all that, I reinstalled my OS to windows 7 beta, boom, worked like a charm. Now It can record two HD channels smoothly at the same time (without the need of an HD converter box -- since it supports QAM I just plug in the cable on the wall). And with media center (builtin in windows 7) I can get all the channels mapped correctly. I have a remote and a IR sensor from an old media center pc (it doesn't have a free PCI-e slot so I cannot simply replace its TV card with this one), so I plugged the sensor to the windows 7 machine. Worked immediately. It saved me a lot of time watching TV because I could use the remote to skip commercials. Can you believe each segment of commercials in a one-hour TV show can be 3 minutes or longer? The real show only runs for about 45 minutes. Overall I'm very happy with the tuner card. The reason for 4 stars is the wintv software.
I bought one of these to use in a home theater PC, in combination with an HVR-1850. This gives my PC a total of 3 OTA HD tuners. Enough to record more HD OTA shows than I will ever need. The card works great under Windows 7. Media center is able to seamlessly use the 3 tuners, including the 2 on this card.
This card only requires a single input cable for the two OTA tuners, so there is no need for an additional video pre-amp.
I couldn't be happier with this card.
Had this card up and running for about a week now.
Installation: had no problems installing this card and getting it to work with Windows 7 Home Premium. Just inserted the card into PCI-x1 slot, then installed latest drivers from Hauppauge website, rebooted, and Windows 7 detected the card as 2 analog and 2 digital tuners.
Picture quality: HD is pretty good. Unless you're an extreme videophile I think you'll be happy. Analog signal seems highly dependent on the channel I'm recording.
I have no regrets about getting this card.
Although the tuners worked with Vista Media Center as advertised, there was a problem with the coax connectors. One of the connectors became partially disconnected from the board and I had to resolder it to ensure a good electrical and physical connection. As an owner of other Hauppauge boards, I was very surprised.
Because of this problem, I recommend using slip-on coax cables with this board as opposed to the normal screw-on type. Even hand-tightening is not gentle enough for this board.
I bought this to replace a dual-tuner analog (NTSC) card, in preparation for the digital (ATSC) transition in June. I still needed analog capability since I have some in-house equipment that broadcasts analog. The dual hybrid tuners of the WinTV-HVR-2250 seemed to be just what I needed.
When it works, it works well. But the drivers are problematic. I experienced random lockups when changing channels which could only be resolved by restarting the Media Center receiver service or rebooting. I worked with Hauppauge Technical support, who could only suggest trying the "beta" drivers. Those were slightly better and resolved some problems, but not all.
After two months of trying to make the Hauppauge card work, I gave up and purchased an external network tv tuner, the SiliconDust HDHR-US HDHomeRun Networked Digital TV Tuner (White)) instead. It doesn't have analog, so I reinstalled my old dual-tuner analog card.
With the HDHomeRun, I now have dual ATSC tuners plus still have the dual NTSC tuners of my old card. No lockups, no codec problems, everything just works! And I don't have to worry about card compatibility with my next computer, since the HDHomeRun works with any computer and any OS. Highly Recommended!'
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