Watch one channel while recording another with the WinTV-PVR-500MCE and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. WinTV-PVR-500MCE contains two complete TV tuners, each with their own hardware MPEG encoder!Ever want to watch the ball game while your favorite late night TV show is on? Well, with WinTV-PVR-500MCE, you don't have to choose which show to watch. Just set the Media Center Edition to record that late night TV show while you continue to watch the ball game, with full PVR capabilities. Pause live TV, replay and skip forward, all while your other TV show continues to be recorded to your PC's hard disk.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: wonderfull Comment: Search for a long time for a good tuner,finally found this 500 series had only but great experience with this dual tuner.The software that comes with it is a joke; but i bought it to run with vista.Had wonderful results no negative feed back.Shipping was great a little to pricey when compared with new egg but it was worth the extra couple of dollars. Customer Rating: Summary: I like the product very much. Comment: I like the product, it works as I would expect it to.
I am using it with Linux (Ubuntu 7) and am only having the expected problems.
It is not high quality video especially on the higher channels (ch 60 and higher), but is not unexpected due to the other reviews I have read.
It is doing what I wanted it for, to record 2 programs at the same time, in good enough quality to be watched, but not so high a quality that I can't stream it over the Wi-Fi connections.
Customer Rating: Summary: Best TV Tuner Comment: Great product, I have multiple products from this company and this one is definitely up to par.
Customer Rating: Summary: I eventually returned this card due to several problems Comment: Amazon was great about shipping this product, but I eventually returned it due to several problems.
I never tried any recordings using the Media Center software that is part of Windows MCE. I was using it with SnapStream BeyondTV 4.1. If you record using anything but the Best (DVD 720x480) quality level it would crop out part of the picture. This is a known issue that is apparently a driver issue. The latest Hauppauge driver did not solve the problem.
The other problem I had is that several times when I was recording two programs at the same time, one of the recordings had nothing but static for the audio portion of it. I don't know if this was a problem with the card or BeyondTV, but I think it's probably due to the card. I don't know if I had a defective card or if this is just a problem with all of these cards.
I also was not that impressed with the overall quality of the video this card captured. I have Hauppauge 250 and 350 cards in a couple of other PCs, and the video quality they capture is noticeably better than that captured by the 500 card. After reading some reviews, it sounds like this is the case for the 150 card also (and the 500 card is basically just two 150s placed on one card). BeyondTV works great with the 250 and 350 cards with none of the issues noted above; but I also only have one tuner card in the PCs that I use these cards in, so I can't comment on how well they would work in a dual tuner setup using BeyondTV.
I returned the 500 card, and I instead purchased two VisionTek Xtasy Theater 550 Pro cards. Thus far I'm not having any of the issues with them in BeyondTV that I was having with the Hauppauge 500 card -- I can record at a lower quality level with no cropping, and I've had no audio issues so far. The quality of the video is also far superior to that captured by the 500 card (although maybe not as good as that captured by the Hauppauge 250 and 350 cards). Customer Rating: Summary: Great tuner card Comment: The card and remote work great. Reception clarity is much better than an older version card from this same company and the remote control works solidly and well. They interface and work with the XP Media Edition beautifully.
The only negative I have is that the installation instructions are a bit lacking - kind of like poorly updated, simple translation of cursory foreign notes. They are not entirely accurate/complete on the contents (didn't mention that there are actually two cards - one small one for part of the external connections) and thus not mentioning anything about it for install. (But just installing it in the next slot and connecting the two cards together with the wire on the second card into the only place that it fits on the first card as if they were one, things work fine.)
