HDHomeRun vs. Hauppauge HVR-1600 question (1 Viewer)

[Odoyle]

I own a Hauppauge HVR-1600 and am having immense difficulty getting it to reliably produce a clear QAM transport stream. The Hauppauge software doesn't display any channels and all that it detects are a bunch of scrambled channels or "UnableToStartGraph" messages in MP. It actually did play one radio station over QAM once and I can get some choppy results with TSReader Lite but no luck with MP. Curiously, it did detect and play play some HD stations over QAM in MP from a different cable provider out of state when I was testing it on holiday.

At this point I'm unable to determine if the problem is with the Hauppauge tuner or my cable provider.

Because my Panasonic HDTV will display whole swaths of Clear QAM stations and Hauppauge's tech support admitted that their tuners are much weaker than the one in the Panasonic, I wonder if a stronger tuner like those in the HDHomeRun will alleviate the issue for me.

Do you think a HDHomeRun likely work out in my situation?

 

[Odoyle]

I'm going to go ahead and answer my own question.

I purchased a HDHomeRun from MythicTV last week (amazing service - shipped day of purchase and I received it 50 hrs later on free shipping!) and set it up in under an hour. It picked up every Clear QAM channel I had detected with TSReader Lite and more. It took a little more time to get it working with Media Portal and after about 8 hours of work I have the Program Guide going.

I'm very satisfied with the HDHomeRun. I had considered Hauppauge to be the "industry standard" PCI tuner and, unless the card I got is a lemon (and I hope it is for the company's sake), Hauppauge hardware pales in comparison. That said, the analog tuner on the HVR-1600 worked as expected, too bad the digital tuner was so weak.

Oh, I have the HDHomeRun picking up signal behind TWO < 1GHz splitters and I haven't seen it drop a single frame yet. Good components and well worth the price.

Anybody wanna buy a Hauppauge HVR-1600?