Hauppauge 1120CN WinTV-HVR-950 Hybrid Video Recorder
by HAUPPAUGE
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Our Price: $299.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Hauppauge 1120CN WinTV-HVR-950 Hybrid Video Recorder
Customer Review: Turns your PC into a Multicast Media Server with 1 click recording!
Summary: 5 Stars
My setup before: Compaq EVO N600C Laptop running Windows XP home / 1.1ghz / 256meg ram
My setup now: HP desktop running Windows XP Pro SP3/ 2.8ghz / 2gb ram
I bought this product 3 years ago (before the digital switch) on the promise that I could record and pause TV. I struggled to mate it to my laptop (which had USB 1.1 ports, which couldn't provide enough power to the thing), then struggled with the recording, then struggled with the fact that the computer itself introduces artifacts with an analog signal, needless to say the built in recording system is time based only. After a week of entertainment value (setting stuff like this up is fun for me) I tossed it in the junk box only for the composite video in... that may be useful for something, someday.)
Fast forward to today: I've come into this century with my hardware and the USB 2 ports I have all provide enough power to the thing, digital signals automagically mask out interference introduced by the computer, and Titan TV has happened.
The result is as far as I know the CHEAPEST, and simplest way to receive and record HDTV at native resolution that I know of.
1. Install WinTV 7 ( free from the website [...] )
2. Create a free account at [...]
3. Hover over a show you want to watch and click on the record button
4. Your show will appear in the scheduled recordings
5. Once the recording starts, You can watch it in progress
(go to the 'recordings' tab and press "watch" with pause and rewind available.)
6. The recordings aren't locked. That is, they can be played by any computer that understands either transport stream or MPEG2, so simply sharing the recordings directory on your local network turns this gadget into a multiroom media server.
7. You can schedule recordings from multiple computers too, but that setup takes much more work (install the app on multiple computers and set directories to be the same networked locations on each. This feature is much more work for a very little convenience.)
So, without any monthly fees, you get
o live TV with pause and rewind
o one click recording
o recorded shows can be watched on any computer on your local net
o support built in for multiple tuners in the same box (if you want to record more than one stream at a time, you would need another tuner.)
You don't get:
o Show summaries on screen or attached to the finished recordings in any way.
( TitanTV listings have the summaries on their website, but WinTV doesn't use them. The recordings have 'show name' then a time stamp on them, that's all, but its enough to be usable in most cases.)
o A usable aerial. The antenna that comes in the box is a neat gadget if you travel, but seriously--upgrade to a real antenna if you want to avoid the skips. It's just like every TV you bought before the DTV switch, they always came with a cheap aerial, and it never worked very well, unless you can see the tower from your front door.
o a usable remote if you are installing to a desktop.
( If this is you--hint: Mirrors work for Infrared. Specifically a silver ball Christmas ornament placed strategically behind your computer will give you a clicker that works. )
Other Easter Eggs:
o On the website is a signal meter app ... which fixes the other complaint I had about this product.
o There's an option in the settings to encode the recording into MPEG2 automatically after the recording is done, which saves a little space and makes more permanent archiving a step easier (DVD's need MPEG2 encoding to play on any DVD player.)
Customer Review: Excellent tuner
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this tuner with a lot of misgivings after reading the user reviews. And more importantly with a nightmare experience with an ati tv wonder usb 2 (DONT BUY one of those) including having it literally melt.
Note i'm a truck driver and have two specific uses for the card. To watch while parked over the road and to record cable at home to watch later. Not looking for "flashy" ie sagetv etc.
Im using a Toshiba l35 with a 1.6ghz processor and 798m ram (700 available). pros: The picture is excellent (compared to prev card). The cute little analog antenna actually works ok (for what it is). I tested it inside a house whos wiring even devastates my cellular net card and it picked up local channels ok. A little snowy but a tv would do the same. Hooked up to cable and it quickly finds all the channels. It is recording as type this. There is a tiny amount of snow in the two tiny recordings ive made so far but nothing to worry about for what i use it for. It is likely that will be solved once i tweak the card/drivers etc. There is No lag for me while watching and recording to a usb drive.
It uses BDA drivers which means in theory it should (soon) be available to all pvr software once it has been around a while. Unfortunately as we speak none of the free pvr software (gbpvr etc) can use it.
Handles widescreen natively. On a widescreen laptop this is nice.
The tuner software is good. Note that is the live view/record software, not pvr. It is simple, clean, easy to understand though it doesnt have any bells and whistles. If you're one of the people all about appearances (want a big pretty pvr screen that fakes being a tv guide thing you wont love it). But it is very functional.
Cons: Some problems with drivers. Had to reinstall drivers to get sound to work. Then when fiddling lost video but this was solved once by unplug/replug of card and the second time (after i fiddled with settings) by running the hauppauge "primary" app.
No pvr software that i can find. It has a scheduler etc that seem to be set to work with titantv but no docs on it, doesnt install automatically i dont think and the xp service crashes when you try to start it. Probably an unusual problem.
PVR software support - this is a new card and support for it in third party apps is virtually nonexistant. However because of the drivers that will probably change soon as opposed to the cards which will never be supported (hello ati).
Conclusion: this card is perfect for my uses though ill need to buy beyondtv or sagetv. With the circuitcity deal for $[...] after rebates you get an hdtv ready card with good low processor capture. It is nearly headache free which is rare in capture cards. I'd buy it again in a heartbeat. Imho the only product that compares to it is the hauppauge tvusb2 for about 30% more that doesnt apparently do htv but has a hardware encoder.. and so far that doesnt even seem to be needed. If you want a card to watch tv on, want hdtv capability and a usb card get this. If you are a video purist who demands stunning clarity.. you may want to stick with pci cards or check out the ultra high end usb cards, though i dont know of one that compares to this unique feature set.
Customer Review: HVR-950 External A/V Source accessory
Summary: 4 Stars
This simple looking HVR-950 IS ONE AMAZING DEVICE!!!
My particular HVR-950 came with an unexpected "external A/V source" adapter. It plugs into the side of the HVR-950 and allows R-L audio, S-video and composite video signals to be seen and recorded from such sources as VCR and DVD players. It works very good. This accessory can also be bought directly from WinTV. See "Customer Images" for a picture of the adapter.
After a month's use I notice the HD picture can be slightly jerky at times but you can still watch it ok. Nice bonus, you can copy the .mpg files you record and burn them to a DVD disc. A half hour HDTV show takes up about 3.75 GB of space. The disc can then be played back on any computer using the Windows Media Player with the wide screen picture appearing just as you saw it originally over the air. However this disc will not play in a regular DVD player.
It took only a half hour from the time I first opened the box, hooked up the hardware and ran the install CD until I was watching NBC National News in good looking HDTV. The Dell 20 inch widescreen monitor I'm using has a native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels, my Desktop setting is 1280x800, video card has 256 MB of memory and the CPU runs at 3 GHz. The viewed TV picture's aspect ratio is adjustable to give a true 1.78 ratio. Antenna being used is a 12 year old Radio Shack fringe area type which pulls in 7 DT stations (11 DT channels) located 15 to 25 miles away along with 5 analog ones. You can download a nice WinTV signal strength indicator for checking out your antenna. The HVR-950 remains cold to the touch until it's actually being used and then becomes warm but not hot.
The included video recorder and scheduler also work good. I did have a jerky picture and/or computer lockup when using the pause or fast forward controls while viewing recorded video. Then I discovered switching from the default "Force Primary" to just "Primary" mode setting found in the WinTV program files eliminated the problem. This also enables "Snapshot" to function in the DT mode. Windows Media Player also works just fine for playback. Recording a 2 hour HDTV show requires 11 GB of hard drive space but the playback picture looks as good as the original. There's also a "TV Pause" mode that starts recording live TV until you can get back and pick up from where you first paused it, like for answering the telephone. Neat.
Version 6 software has "skin" files that I used to slightly modify or personalize the appearance of the WinTV player. The basic HVR-950 hardware is definitely well engineered, very useful and is not a gadget. The more you experiment the better it works. I'm giving only a 4 star rating because there is no on screen "Help" information when you are using the latest version 6 software but I'm still very pleased with this product.
Customer Review: Good enough...for the price
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this on the Amazon.com Black Friday sale, so after rebates (which I hope comes through) it will be $34. That's not bad for an HD and analog tuner.
It comes with the USB 2 dongle (aka the tv card), a roughly 6 inch usb extension cable (which works wonders if your usb hub is jam packed with other usb devices, like mine), an antenna that receives both HD and analog, and this component cable that allows you to use this as an HD tuner on an HD tv. I haven't tried out the last one, so I cannot speak to its quality.
The picture quality on my non-HD monitor is great. I love watching HD football and HD programming (did you know there are four HD PBS stations in the Bay Area?!). I don't even bother with the analog stations anymore, but it is nice to know they are there. The video record mode is great, too. I recorded the Patriots/Giants game in HD and it was like watching it live, except I can skip all the jibber jabber and commercials. The last 3 quaters took roughly 1 hour. Downside is when I recorded at highest resolution, the 2.5 hours took up 17gigabites. But hard drive space is cheap these days and I deleted the video. And if you want to keep it, I'm sure there's a video encoding program out there that can shrink that down to something more manageable.
The antenna has about a 6 foot cable and I don't think most people know this, but the antenna can be pulled to extend up to about 1.5 feet tall. The antenna looks very natural at it's 5 inch "compressed" height, and the only reason I know that the antenna could be extended is because I wanted to pull the cap off, but the antenna elongated, instead. Reception is very picky on where you place the antenna, so have patience. If it doesn't work at all, you may want to look into an amplified HD antenna.
Terk HDTVa Indoor Amplified High-Definition Antenna for Off-Air HDTV Reception ^This one seems to have very high reviews.
A couple bad things:
-I tried installing this on Vista Ultimate with software downloaded directly from Hauppauge's website, and it was very confusing. They don't clearly label which file is for which version of tv card and which file the drivers are and which the program itself is in. Took a couple of tries before I got it.
-No Closed Captioning.
-I can't do screen captures, and the only error message is some vague 3 word thing that doesn't tell you how it might be fixed.
Overall, even at full price of ~[...], very much worth it for some HD.
Customer Review: Great tuner if you're willing to invest
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great tuner. I've been using the Hauppauge 150 (an analog tuner) for over a year now which worked pretty well for me, i just wasn't happy with the picture quality. So i decided to get a new computer and buy this HD stick. My computer, in case it helps, has 2 GB of RAM and the Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor.
I installed this for the first time and it didn't work, so I decided to take out my Analog tuner (the 150) and try again, and after restarting it worked pretty well. I found that if I touched the antenna, the reception was better and it didn't miss frames, which was a pain because I wasn't about to hold on to the antenna the whole time it recorded. So I went to radioshack and bought a better antenna for 25 bucks which works WAY better. Almost perfect reception now.
Everyone says that the program that comes with the tuner is buggy and crashes a lot and stuff, and I assumed that with a new computer it would be ok. It's NOT. The program that comes with the tuner is not great. I've been using it for my analog tuner, and it was alright, but definitely not what i was looking for since it doesn't automatically record favorites or anything like that. It also lays out the channels weird, and sometimes on startup doesn't even show the tuner at all. So I decided to try out one of the trial programs. I tried BeyondTV first, and found that the image was really dark. Then i tried SageTV which works great. The only problem I have is that it crashes every now and then while I'm watching a previously recorded show and taping something at the same time. It works just fine when it's only recording.
I found that using these third party programs is the only way to use my analog tuner at the same time as this HD tuner, so I guess I'm gonna have to upgrade from the trial.
As for using my computer's resources, it doesn't slow me down (although my computer is pretty fast to begin with). Right now I'm recording two shows, one on each tuner and my CPU usage is at 3% and my memory is at 38%, which is only slightly higher than when it idles.
So, if you want a good picture quality and don't mind spending extra $$$ on a new antenna and software, this is definitely a great tuner. Just don't expect it to work great out of the box.