Hauppauge WINTV-PVR 250 w/ Remote $90 after $60MIR

[Bensadic]

Interesting... I bought that Toshiba SD-H400. Of course, it'd be nice to have something on my computer too... Oh, forget it. I tried to turn my 'puter into a PVR before and was too lazy to troubleshoot all the problems.

[Hux]

From experience, I can safely say that this card is an awesome card for a homebrew DVR solution such as MythTV. Also, MythTV does support having more than one of these cards in a machine

[georgelucas45]

Grrrr. Just bought the ATI TV Wonder PRO w/ RC a week ago. $75 wasn't a bad price, but this is worth the $15 more.

[tachikaze]

good price, but i'm waiting for a slick deal on the 350. It has both tv-in and tv-out. makes for less hardware in my mythbox

[Zoz]

Does this record DVD quality from any input?
Are they time consuming to setup? I would prefer not to spend more time setting this up than I do watching TV. :-)

[Hux]

Quote from tachikaze : good price, but i'm waiting for a slick deal on the 350. It has both tv-in and tv-out. makes for less hardware in my mythbox

I think it's less likely for a good deal on the PVR-350. My Myth box had a 350 and a 250, and honestly, if you have a video card with a good tv-out, it's a lot less hassle than setting up the tv-out of the PVR-350, though, not quite the level of quality you get with the 350. (No deinterlacing is needed with the 350...)

[cerobit]

sweet deal..thanks for the post. I was ready to purchase a PVR-250 and allocated $150.00 for it.. U just saved me $50.00!!!

my local store and online were out of stock, so i'm picking one up near my mom's place.. i'm visting her today anyway, so no prob.

the $10.50 sales tax sux, but o well..

Now i'm looking for a cheap video out card for this PVR box i'm building.. if anyone has suggestions, i'm all ears!

[Odd Ballz]

order it up for in store pickup... tax was 12.00, but wth, decent price... thanks SD.

[SuperNinja]

How good is this one?

http://www.compgeeks.com/details....TVUSB2800R

[cat5]

Im a newbee with recording digital video from various sources. Can you guys explain just exactly what is PVR and what exactly this unit does?? Im veyr interetested. Is this the best setup to go with, or those AIW card better??

[tart666]

Quote : It has a MPG2 hardware decoder

don't you mean "hardware encoder"?

[Fubar411]

The 350 has the decoder as well. But it'll cost you.

[georgelucas45]

Quote : http://www.compgeeks.com/details....TVUSB2800R

Isn't 720x480 a pretty grainy picture? Cuz Iknow that TV wonderpro recording is worthless. I just bought it cuz I don't have a TV

[acketon]

Quote from georgelucas45 : Isn't 720x480 a pretty grainy picture? Cuz Iknow that TV wonderpro recording is worthless. I just bought it cuz I don't have a TV

no, 720x480 is a decent resolution, same as DVD's Of course your quality depends on the quality of your cable signal, so you might want to replace some wall plate connectors, or have the cable tech come and test the signal strength. it's what I had to do to improve quality.

The card records into MPEG 2, same as a DVD uses, that does not mean it is the same quality as a DVD, but this is about the best quality tuner card out there, except for some really expsensive HDTV ones just starting to come out.

I have the PVR 250 MCE edition, it works perfect

I'd highly recomend getting Sage-TV or Beyond TV, i use Sage -TV, as the Software that comes with the card is quite pathetic, Sage or beyond TV add lots of features and better quality. It will take some tweaking to get the card up to peak performance, such as changing Mpeg 2 Codecs, and stuff, but it's worth it.

I currently use the card to watch TV on my computer, since i don't have a televsion in my bedroom, and I also use it to Record Deep Space Nine, Stargate Sg-1, and Stargate Atlantis, straight to a DVD (won't have to spend $700 on the Star Trek Deep Space Nine DVD's!!!!)


If you get this, you're gonna want to spend the cash on Sage-TV or Beyond TV, or something similar like MythTV (I've never used that one), I think there might be some freeware ones too.


This card is much, much better than those cheap USB ones, this is hardware based instead of softare based like the USB ones, or the ATI All in Wonder. this gives you better quality and the tuner card's hardware does the work instead of your CPU, i can run Sage-TV in sleep mode, which will record tv on it's own in the background,with only a 2% cpu usage, so i'm free to do other things. Watching TV does take up more CPU usage obviously, but not too bad only about 40%, course that depends on your Computers Specs, and mine is only an AMD 2000xp 512mb RAM


anyway, my $0.02