Hauppauge 1229 WinTV-HVR-2250 White Box for System Builders Dual Hybrid PCI-E TV Tuner Board

Comment: WinTV (the accompanying software) crashed or did not work as advertised in a brand spanking new Windows 7 64-bit environment. Went back to pure Media Center mode but the card was a little "finicky" in the sense that tuning would take ages. The package did not include any antenna even the rinky dink one. Try receiving ATSC signals without an antenna in the 'burbs. Is PCI-E really necessary?

Comment: my only complain about this card is that it doesn't come with any software at all. when I got it the cd comes only with drivers only. I sent an email to the manufacturer and they told me that I have to spend an extra $10 for the software to record TV.. It's the first time that I buy a card and it doesn't come with the software. $114 is more than enough for the tuner and the software, but they want you to spend more money for something that is already expensive.

Comment: 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.

Comment: Be careful what you order from amazon. I've had this item in my cart awhile (say months) while I was deciding if I should go ahead and purchase it or not. Somewhere along the lines, it changed from the full retail version to the "System Builders" white box. I did not notice this and imagine my surprise when this arrives with no remote or software.

Not a huge deal, I imagine the remote wasn't that great anyway, but would have been nice to have so I didn't need to purchase an additional remote. The software also wasn't that big of a deal since I am running Win7 x64 Ultimate which has Media Center software built in. I prefer Media Center over their application WinTV anyway.

My next problem is with Hauppauge. This card comes builtin with a capture card. I read on their website and the manual associated with this item that there is a way to disable the encoding and get the raw stream which is dubbed gaming mode. This basically stops the ENORMOUS delay when capturing from a console. Obviously I didn't read well enough. While they do have that feature, it is not available on this particular card. And you can only activate that mode if you have the WinTV software as well!

Two problems there, since I wasn't given the software, I couldn't enable this mode if I wanted to, and second, why would you put it in the manual if it's not available for the product you're looking at.

Very unhappy with this purchase.

Comment: This product has performed with absolute perfection for me. Used in conjunction with Windows Media Center, it has become what I had long dreamed of in a DVR.