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: This thing SUX!
Summary: 1 Stars
Good: Cheap, (unofficial) Linux support
Bad: Terrible software, Audio sync issue, CPU intensive, no remote
Included software (for windows) is just terrible, filled with bugs and awfully designed.
Biggest issue with these TV tuners (seems common for a bunch of people - read the forums), after a while the audio looses sync with video. Starts with a delay of a couple of milliseconds and ends up lagging a couple of seconds. You have to restart the application to (temporarily) fix this. Also it's very CPU intensive. I have a Centino 1.7Ghz and it's consuming about 50% of CPU while the application is running.
My last hope was that it will work in Linux better, but Linux support is alpha at best. There are no drivers for it in the kernel tree (as of 2.6.23.9) so you need external development drivers and firmware. After a couple of hours recompiling my kernel and all those drivers i still wasn't able to make it work. I successfully loaded the em2880 module and fired up mplayer, xawtv and zapping. Mplayer and xawtv don't work at all while zapping gets a scrambled signal and no sound.
In conclusion i wouldn't recommend this product to anyone. Linux or windows.
Customer Review: Consumes a fair bit of processing power.
Summary: 4 Stars
This product installed very easily.
The tuner also includes a dongle that allows you to input video, S-video and audio through the tuner. In addition to this, Hauppauge provides a small portable antenna that will bring in any over air digital signals but I have yet to see it work.
The picture is so-so but I have to remember that my screen resolution is much higher than the resolution of a TV signal. Therefore any fuzz you get is quite obvious on your screen.
The additional audio and video line in is handy to use with a cable box since the coax input will not accept cable or satellite signals, according to the specifications.
This item does see to generate a bit of heat when in use so I would make sure that it is not covered by anything.
I have a core-duo 2.2ghz processor with 4gb of ram and when I open the program that came with it, my processor immediately jumps up to 33%. Perhaps a TV card with on board processing would have been better.
Overall, this has been a fine product and I like the ability to use it on my desktop and laptop.
Customer Review: Solid device from the best name in TV on the PC
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the 3rd Hauppauge TV on the PC device I have owned, and the 3rd that's delivered exactly what it says it will.
It is resource intensive, but newer Laptop/PC's won't have any problem. I'm using it with an older PC (Athlon64 2800+ w/ 1GB) & a brand new (very fast) Dell Latitude laptop....and it works fine on both. It definitely slows down the PC, but it doesn't impact simple stuff, like light browsing on the internet or using MS Word. I don't even notice that it's running on the multicored & many gigabyted laptop.
Don't try to run this from a USB hub, even if it's just an analog signal. Plug it directly into the PC. This is common sense, and is clearly warned in the manual. Running it from a hub will slow everything else on the hub and the PC to a crawl. I tried this and confirmed it.
Again, I have a developed a great deal of trust in Hauppauge products. I have tried and returned other TV-to-PC products, but have never had a Hauppauge product fail or not deliver what it was supposed to. My short time with this device only reinforces that opinion too.
Customer Review: MCE 2005 support?
Summary: 3 Stars
I received the HVR-950 for Christmas. I had hoped to use it in a MCE 2005 machine (the box says MCE support on it). However, I've been unable to get the MCE software to recognize it (MCE 2005 does recognize my Hauppanauge PVR-250 card so I know my configuration works). I can run the software that came with the HVR-950 and see that the hardware works - though the software that comes with it is amazingly unpolished and clunky. I guess Hauppanuage wants you to buy their ReplayTV PVR software instead.
I've check the Hauppanuage support website and the support area doesn't include the HVR-950 as one of the supported products for MCE 2005 and offers no advice for resolving this issue. At this point, I'm giving up on getting the stick working on my MCE machine.
Now I'm using it on my laptop (a XP Home machine). The hardware and included software do work on my laptop. Digital channels seem to work fine with the included antenna. So I'm giving the product 3 stars - meaning it isn't a total bust. Had real MCE support worked out of the box, I'd have given it more stars.
Customer Review: HVR-950 works with Ubuntu Linux
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased this cool Hybrid TV tuner to use with my Ubuntu Gutsy Linux install on a Dell D505 laptop. Why Linux and not Windows XP? Well, the fact of the matter is this old dell is too slow to process the ATSC and locks up during most shows. I recommend a dual-core processor to do this properly (even on Linux).
But, at least in Linux the video can be watched after MythTV records it a bit.
The directions to setup both tvtime and mythtv can be googled neither is too complicated with Ubuntu Gutsy or Feisty.
There are 2 TV standards to this tuner and ATSC digital over-the-air TV requires the IVTV firmware be compiled and installed on your system. The second is as simple as doing a modprobe saa7134 to activate the analog tuner.
But, the simple part ends here... TVtime is required for analog plus a sox string to get sound. For the ATSC signal mythtv worked well. Like I said above, there is a delay before the video becomes stable, but at least it works much better than on windows xp on the same hardware.