Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 - Capture cards

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Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600

Tv Tuner
Digital TV
ATSC
HDTV
Analog VideoIn
MPEG1 hardware
MPEG2 hardware

Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP
Vista NT4? MAC? Linux
*based on user reports.

PCI

$200

6.8 (6.8)
8 votes

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Description (from the manufacturer site)

Watch hi-definition ATSC digital TV on your PC!
Analog cable TV, too!

Dual format TV receiver for your PC. Watch ATSC digital TV or analog cable TV, in a window or full screen.

Watch and record all ATSC formats, including the highest definition 1080i format!

Includes TV scheduler, the new Hauppauge remote control and IR blaster to control satellite and cable TV set top boxes.

WinTV-HVR-1600 has these great features

Watch and record ATSC high definition digital TV or analog cable TV on your PC, in a window or full screen! ATSC HD is the over-the-air high definition TV standard for North America.

Two tuners on board: a 125 channel cable ready TV tuner and an ATSC digital TV tuner. Connect both cable TV and ATSC digital TV to the WinTV-HVR-1600 at the same time.

Includes Hauppauge's WinTV2000 application. Our WinTV2000 application allows you to toggle between cable TV and ATSC digital TV channels.

Includes an IR blaster to change the channel on your satellite or cable TV set top box. Connect your set top box to the WinTV-HVR-1600 via S-Video.

Bundled software includes a TV scheduler plus ULead's® DVD MovieFactory™ authoring and burning software.

Digital ATSC HD TV features

ATSC over-the-air digital TV receiver built-in. Supports all ATSC formats, up to the high definition 1080i format!

Record ATSC digital TV to your PC's hard disk using high quality MPEG-2. TV recordings will typically consume 5 Gb of disk space per hour for ATSC high definition.

Analog TV features

125 channel cable ready TV receiver built-in. With dbx-TV stereo decoder, for great TV sound.

Composite/S-Video and audio inputs, for cable or satellite set top boxes or VCRs.
Record TV shows to your PC's hard disk using the built-in high quality hardware MPEG-2 encoder. While recording, the hardware encoder does all the work so your PC continues to run at full speed!
1-2 Gigabytes of disk is used per hour of recorded video.

More information

Comments

8 comments, Showing 1 to 8 comments

I'm using this card on Slackware with MythTV. The analog side of the card performs just like a WinTV PVR x50 series. At 720x480 5000kbit/s the image quality is good enough. It looks just like the old analog captures from my DVCII. When played back on our TVs they look the same as what our cable company provides.

The ATSC/Clear QAM side of things look as they should - crystal clear. Which is expected since it is just a stream copy, and not an encoded signal.

There's an S-Video input connector, and mini audio plug. Plus an A/V header on-board. You can order a connector for this header with S-Video/Composite video input and RCA audio input.

The remote feels a little cheap and light weight. One or two good thumps is all I think it would take. The sensor seems a little directional - 5/10. Not a real issue, remotes are a dime a dozen, and easy enough to configure. Hauppauge sells a replacement for $10.

The card needs a newer motherboard (PCI 2.0 spec). It occupies 64MB of address space, compared to my nVidia GPU which only takes up 32MB of address space. You may have to increase your vmalloc to get the card to play nicely with other hardware. The HVR1600 was unstable on my trusty 440BX motherboard. Works like a treat on nVidia and Intel boards.

Given that the card was under $100, I feel it was a good deal. PVR150 and HVR1250 in one card.

I didn't buy this card as a CAPTURE CARD - there are better options for general capture, I got it because it's a TV Tuner which encodes to mpeg2. Mpeg2 has low resource requirements for play back, plus nVidia's xvmc libraries allow 1080i playback with a PIII 600 MythTV frontend.

Comments posted by disturbed1 from United States, March 27, 2009:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux - Rated: 9 of 10.

Included software DOES NOT work correctly under XP, but does in Vista. Digital broadcast(ATSC) reception and display is good. Cannot receive analog broadcast and digital (ATSC) channels at the same time.

User guide info is nearly nonexistent. Software program menus and settings are highly non-intuitive. Despite hardware MPEG encoding, adds bad motion blurring even with moderate speed motion. S-video input to MPEG-2 output file produces a picture with a black matte on all sides of the actual captured video. There is no ability to crop and/or resize during capture.

Comments posted by wincrazy from United States, January 20, 2009:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 6 of 10.

This tuner has a lot going for it. Price, flexibility and compatibility for key players on the Windows side. The tuner has analog and digital inputs and was a snap to install. The latest Hauppauge drivers work great in XP and Vista. The bundled remote is quite adequate for most viewers, and is supported by the system that support the card: Snapstream and Windows MCE. The onboard encoder is ideal for older CPU's, but mind that HDTV has no recording settings and eats up HD space. I played around with quite a few interfaces (Meedio, Yahoo TV, GBPVR, etc) that aren't compatabile as of yet, although Hauppauge products generally receive some good community support, so that might change soon.

Comments posted by Bengance from United States, May 12, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 9 of 10.

When Hauppauge products work, they produce better results than the competition, and you want to buy even more better Hauppauge cards in the future. When they don’t work, you will hate them with hot death, and they will drain actual life from your body and leave you emotionally scarred. Just know that ahead of time. Hauppauge wins the Worst Greatest Horrible Best Product in its Class Award pretty much every year. That said, I’m liking this card so far.

60-field interlacing from my 480i MiniDV recordings and 1980’s era VHS home movies was preserved and translated perfectly with the hardware encoder and looks great on a DVD player output to a standard NTSC 480i TV. In XP Windows Media Player 11 actually upscales the 1600’s 60-field MPEG2 output to 60fps progressive video, so it looks surprisingly great. I actually didn’t expect that..

Hardware-based analog to MPEG2 conversion is good at high bitrates. Converting interlaced VHS to DVD at a near transparent quality was approx 100MB/minute (about 45 minutes per single-layer DVD). Motion becomes blocky at lower bitrates. Still an excellent space saver compared to dumping a MiniDV directly to the drive. Software encoding on a very good system will produce more efficient results, but this card at least doesn’t slam your CPU while it makes MPEG2.

ATSC HDTV works wonderfully where broadcast signals are strong, the internal receiver is not too powerful but it’s better than the HVR-950. Direct SVideo feed from the cable box/VCR looks very good.

Overlay stopped working in WinTV 2000 early on and I just got a black screen. I’ve had a lot of Hauppauge products so I actually expected something to be broken right off the bat. A little googling revealed other people have had this problem with HVR Hauppauge cards in XP, HOWEVER I ended up using GBPVR instead of WinTV 2000 and it was no longer an issue. A recent driver update seems to have fixed the overlay blackout in WinTV 2000 (HVR-1600 only, my HVR-950 still has no overlay), but I still prefer GBPVR’s handling of interlaced video. WinTV2k doesn’t offer de-interlacing options in live-TV or PVR playback for the HVR-1600 for some reason, the options are not even there and the output is defaulted to single-field interpolated mode.

Recommended with reservations (a la HOC) you will probably have to troubleshoot this card at some point, and it may make you crazy. But when it works it's absolutely one of the best.

Comments posted by Armand from United States, May 04, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 8 of 10.

This card seems to do everything that it is advertised to do.. . but, the documentation is a bit vague on the topic of what format the winTV2000 software is using to store recordings from the HD tuner. The default, and apparently only format for HD recordings, uses about 5GB/hour. I was hoping to be able to record HD then post process to Mpeg4 (Divx, xvid, or H.264...) for use on various portable media players. So far, the saved HD files have resisted all attempts to do this. AutoGK chokes on them, with the DGIndex app crashing every time... something about not being able open/read the d2v file. AVS Video Converter says it is an "incompatible format".

I haven't tried any of the 3rd party apps for recording yet. Does anybody have any suggestions to save me the trouble of trying them all?

Comments posted by Rudy from United States, March 15, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 4 of 10.

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard
Intel P4 3.0Ghz 800FSB/512K/478Pin Northwood CPU
ATi All-in-Wonder Radeon 9600 Pro AGP video
1GB 400DDR memory

This card seems to be quite picky about what PCI slot it's in. Hauppauge suggests that it may need to be in the 1st or 2nd slot, which I found not to be true. On my son's PC (Abit motherboard), it wouldn't scan any channels until it was moved to the 2nd PCI slot. On my PC (above), it wouldn't scan any channels until being put in the 3rd PCI slot.

I've found this card to have some very nice characteristics. The hardware analog encoder produces a picture that looks almost the equal of the analog picture resulting from the fine-tuned software of my AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, all while practically leaving the CPU alone. Another strong characteristic of this card is having a very good tuner. With 80 feet of RG6, two splitters and two wallplate unions between my roof-mounted Channel Master 4221 antenna and the PC, the tuner pulls in every digital station in our area without any dropouts (we'll have to see if that remains true once more leaves fill the nearby trees).

The WinTV2000 software is serviceable, and the link to TitanTV seems to be working correctly - "watch" and "record" (scheduled only) from the online guide has worked properly every time so far. Digital tuning is generally much slower than analog tuning anyway, and WinTV seems to be a little slower than the tuner on my TV or either of my cable DVRs. Pressing One-Touch-Pause or One-Touch-Record results in a delay of several seconds where no picture at all is visible. It's hard to tell when the recording actually started until looking at the actual file.

The scheduler works, but I can't get the application's user-interface to work properly. Whenever I try to add or edit a scheduled recording, the sub-window is cut off at the bottom and I've found no keyboard method of activating the Save or Cancel control buttons that are supposed to be down there. I tried changing the resolution of my desktop from 1600 x 1200 to 1280 x 1024 but it didn't make any difference.

I'd like to find a 3rd party solution because of the shortcomings of the Hauppauge software, but I don't want anything that's going to take over the whole desktop. Does anybody know of anything?

Comments posted by Tim from United States, March 14, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 6 of 10.

I purchased the card a few days ago. I had some trouble getting it
to work with a gygabite mobo with 3200xp, 1gb ddr400, 500gb hardi
sk, a nvidia 6800gt.
The problem was not related to hardware. The drivers are fine as
well. the software was the real problem. i have a hdtv 32 inch plu
ged into the 6800gt. I and had a hardtime getting the aspect ratio
working correctly. another major issue was the overlay problem.
not correct at all. it locked and crashed my pc tons of times.
I then decided to hunt for demo software to see which one would
work.
intervideo-media center software crashed
powercinema is awsome but i had screen drm preventing me to vie
w some of the hdtv channels locking up. When it worked, it worke
d awsome. analog channel was a pain to see since it wasnt as clear
.
beyond tv is crap-bloatware
sagetv is good but it crashed often
nero home is terrible.
I then tried totalmedia 3. it is the best in user friendliness, best pi
cture in hi definition as well as analog and recorded hdtv shows pla
yback asclear as you recorded the show.. the only problem is no s
upport for 5.1 at the moment.
for an antena, i picked up an antena from walgreens. rca with sign
al booster. I pulled out the rabit ears and left the loop. it works j
ust fine.
picture is awsome, hardware is good, just get totalmedia 3 and som
e good signaal boosted antenna.

Comments posted by Cresho from United States, February 01, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP? Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 10 of 10.

This card will not work in my Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 motherboard. The system will not boot even to the BIOS. If this card is plugged into ANY PCI slot, the system will not boot up...it just sits there and doesn't make a sound. I assumed the card was dead and got another one...exact same problem. I have used other PCI cards in this system with good results. I am returning my Hauppauge HVR-1600.

Comments posted by David from United States, January 21, 2007:
Compatibility: Win95? Win98? Win2K? WinXP Vista? NT4? MAC? Linux? - Rated: 2 of 10.

8 comments, Showing 1 to 8 comments

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Feature
What kind of main capture features it supports
Analog VideoIn = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input
Video Card = If it is a Video Card/Graphic Card
Tv Tuner = Built-In TV-Tuner
Digital TV = Built-In Digital TV-Tuner
DV/Firewire = DV/Firewire/i.Link input
DV Converter = Analog composite or/and SVHS video input and converts to DV video
MPEG1 hardware = Capture directly MPEG1(VCD) video using hardware*
MPEG2 hardware = Capture directly MPEG2(SVCD and DVD) video using hardware*
MJPEG hardware = Capture directly to MJPEG using hardware*
MPEG4 hardware = Capture directly to MPEG4(DivX,Xvid) video using hardware*
* = Most capture cards can capture to this format using software but it usually requires a very fast computer, if it supports realtime capturing it uses the capture cards hardware and it doesn't require a very fast computer and you may get better quality but less options/settings than software capturing.

Compatibility
What Operating System our users have reported that it works on, Win95=Works ~~Win95~~=Does not work Win95?=Not tested This is user based.

Cnx = Connection
What type of connection the capture device has to the computer, PCI, AGP, USB1/1.1/2, DV or PCMCIA.

Price
The price in US dollar.

Rating
The first rating is based on a weighted rank (the true Bayesian), it requires at least 5 votes to get a weighted rating.
The second rating between the ( ) is a normal average rating.

Comment
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