I suppose my expectations were a little high, but I am finding the whole TV card in PC solution a little disappointing.
I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1300 MCE edition.
Aside from the remote not working because the driver supplied (and the one on the site) won't install, the whole software is unstable and full of issues.
The WinTV 2000 program works, only just, but it runs into issues and slows down or crashes as soon as you flick channels, or pretty much do anything other than leave it on a channel and watch.
It doesn't find all the channels available either. I get my TV through a cable, and my standard TV finds about 70 channels. WinTV managed 20.
I tried third party software that supports this card. Beyond TV and Mediaportal. Mediaportal is the better of the two, but it won't resize to full screen, just windowed mode, and I cant even maximise it or resize it larger. If I try, the whole program layout goes pear shaped and you can just hear the channel.
Sometimes when any of the programs starts the bottom quarter of the TV screen is cut off and showing something other than what should be there. You have to restart the PC and then its gone.
Overall its all just too fiddly compared to switching on your TV set and watching. The potential for the functionality I expected is there, it just doesn't work well enough. I am glad at this stage I didn't invest on a whole media centre PC based on a TV card, and just stuck the TV card into my existing PC as a stepping stone.
The saving grace is recording works well once I get to the channel I want to record. It is the main reason I got the card for, to record to hard disk without having to get a new DVD recorder/player and throw away the player I have.
Has anyone else tried to get this card to work on Windows XP SP2 with 3rd party programs rather than Windows Media Centre 2005? I'd be glad to read about the solutions you found if any, or whether there's better software and drivers out there that I could use.
I bought a Hauppauge HVR-1300 MCE edition.
Aside from the remote not working because the driver supplied (and the one on the site) won't install, the whole software is unstable and full of issues.
The WinTV 2000 program works, only just, but it runs into issues and slows down or crashes as soon as you flick channels, or pretty much do anything other than leave it on a channel and watch.
It doesn't find all the channels available either. I get my TV through a cable, and my standard TV finds about 70 channels. WinTV managed 20.
I tried third party software that supports this card. Beyond TV and Mediaportal. Mediaportal is the better of the two, but it won't resize to full screen, just windowed mode, and I cant even maximise it or resize it larger. If I try, the whole program layout goes pear shaped and you can just hear the channel.
Sometimes when any of the programs starts the bottom quarter of the TV screen is cut off and showing something other than what should be there. You have to restart the PC and then its gone.
Overall its all just too fiddly compared to switching on your TV set and watching. The potential for the functionality I expected is there, it just doesn't work well enough. I am glad at this stage I didn't invest on a whole media centre PC based on a TV card, and just stuck the TV card into my existing PC as a stepping stone.
The saving grace is recording works well once I get to the channel I want to record. It is the main reason I got the card for, to record to hard disk without having to get a new DVD recorder/player and throw away the player I have.
Has anyone else tried to get this card to work on Windows XP SP2 with 3rd party programs rather than Windows Media Centre 2005? I'd be glad to read about the solutions you found if any, or whether there's better software and drivers out there that I could use.
