After going through a horrific experience with AverTV HD DVR, I bought this product directly through Hauppauge. This card tops AverTV HD DVR 10 fold. No questions asked.
Best part, this card does all of the video encoding, meaning your PC's CPU hardly does anything at all. The quality that it gives is incredible with the file size being relatively small. Colossus gets captured using software such as WinTV and Arcsoft. WinTV records into a format of .ts. You can easily import the .ts file into adobe premiere if you rename .ts to .mpg. No problem.
You can record pretty much anything except for PS3 through HDMI, but you can record Xbox 360 and PC through HDMI.
Pros:
Hardware Encoder (No CPU Usage)
Excellent Quality
Great Software
Video and Audio are in sync
Cons:
None. Hauppauge Colossus PCI Express Internal HD-PVR TV Tuners & Video Capture 01414
I purchased this card to allow for my Windows 7 Media Center (W7MC) PC to capture and display HD video from my set top box tuner. I have played with the included software just for troubleshooting purposes and cannot comment much on that topic. Here is my experience (mostly pertaining to using this card with W7MC).
Pros:
* Easy install (installed the card, loaded the drivers/software off of the included CD and it was up and running)
* Captured video is of very good quality
* Large number of supported inputs (Composite Video, Component Video, HDMI, Optical/toslink Audio, Digital Coaxial Audio, Analog Audio)
* Can be made to work with W7MC with the use of DVBLink (a software add-on from DVBLogic at a cost of $40)
Cons:
* Third-party software is needed to integrate with W7MC
* Not really a Hauppauge issue - but DVBLink software does not support composite video when used to integrate device with W7MC (only HD sources)
* Practically no printed documentation included with product - all documentation is on the included CD.
I've been thinking about upgrading my archiving capabilities for a while now. For the last 5 years or so, I used a Panasonic DVD recorder to offload my shows and football games from my Directv HD DVR. It did the job quite nicely. However, I really wanted to go HD all the way to the disk. I was looking for the simplest solution possible. That means, capture the footage, edit it(with no re-encoding), make the menus and burn the file to disk while maintaining excellent quality.
I ended up getting the Hauppauge HDPVR about 2 months ago and was quite happy with it. I happen to come across the Hauppauge Colossus purely by accident, and fortunately for me, was able to return the HD PVR before the 30 days were up. My main reasons for keeping the Colossus were:
1)It costs less
2)It's an internal PCI-e card
3)It can record at a higher bitrate
4)It can record from an unencrypted HDMI source
First of all, let me just say that I only use the Colossus to capture shows off my Directv HD DVR. I don't use the WinTv app, I don't use the IR blaster, or any of the other options for tuning tv stations. It's simply my HD capture solution. For my needs, it works great. It comes with software (Arcsoft Showbiz) for recording, editing, and burning your footage to disk.
I only use it to record footage to my hard drive. For editing purposes, I use Videoredo TVSuite V4 so I don't have to re-encode my edited footage. With the Showbiz software, it always wants to re-encode unless you're only chopping off the beginning and the end of the file.
For making my final output file that gets burnt to disk I use a free program called MultiAVCHD coupled with ImageBurn (another free program). I burn the file to a Blu ray blank (BD-R) and it comes out with full menus and chapter menus as well. The Showbiz burning program will only let you burn to DVD or DVD-DL disks. It won't work with Blu rays. By using BD-Rs, I can record nearly 3 hours of 1920 x 1080 HD at 18 mbps onto a single 25 GB disk.
The recording quality is excellent. It's maybe slightly nicer that the Hauppauge HD PVR (not by much). The biggest improvement I've found is that when I'm recording AC3 audio with the Colossus, if the source feed has a dropout, which happens occasionally, I don't lose nearly 10 seconds of video feed like the HD PVR use to. That's big for me.
The great thing about the Colossus is that it is a hardware encoder. It does all the heavy lifting itself and leaves your CPU free to do other things at the same time. The only thing you might have trouble with on an older computer is playing back the recorded H.264 file. However, you can still capture with it no problem.
All in all, I'm extremely happy with my purchase.
I've had seven SD and HD Hauppauge cards in the past decade and was pleased with all of them. Hauppauge makes great hardware, they just work. I'm currently running a 2250 and an external 1212 and can record 1080i with both at the same time on the same computer with no issues. Excellent cards.
HOWEVER...
This 1414 was a nightmare and I regret buying it. I'm often an early adopter and used to new tech not working right out of the box - but the 1414 is not ready for prime time.
Unlike every other Hauppauge card, the 1414 can not be used in a computer with any other capture devices installed - including other Hauppauge cards (like my 2250 and 1212). Support says they are working on new drivers. No time frame was given.
The current drivers are very buggy. The 1414 will randomly be rendered useless - in Windows 7 device manager the error in properties: "device cannot start". Support is working on a fix.
WinTV 7 is all but worthless, just a string of error messages most of the time. WinTV has always been bare-bones and buggy but I was unable to get any video with WinTV 7 at all.
The included "Showbiz" software does preview video (so the hardware does work) but randomly locks up to the point of requiring a hard restart of Windows 7. Again support is "aware of the issue".
I want to love this card - unfortunately it's not worth the time and effort invested that resulted in nothing but frustration. The people who get the card to work seem to love it - unfortunately, there are message boards filled with poor SOBs like myself pulling their hair out over this card.
NOT RECOMMENDED - Hdtv - Hauppauge - Hd Pvr - High Definition'
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