Hauppauge 1196 WinTV HVR-1250 Hybrid Video Recorder

Very Good

Strengths: Utilizes PCI-E slot, which is probably vacant if you are non-gamer.

Weakness: Setting it up for Vista Media Center took a few tries.

If you are non-gamer like me, your relatively new PC probably has a vacant PCI-E slot while conventional PCI slot is all used up by TV tuner, secondary graphics card, etc. Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 utilizes the PCI-E slot, so it's an ideal choice.

Watch out for x64 OSes

Strengths: Easy installation, fairly intuitive interface

Weakness: Audio Sync issues, Blue Screens in Windows XP x64

I recently had to upgrade my PC, and I was looking for something in an ATI All in Wonder to replace my AGP AIW 8550. At the time that I purchased this card, they didn't have another unit like that (I note that they do now), so I figured that I'd give this one a shot. It's not a bad card on the surface, but the drivers are not the best on x64 Operating systems. The WinTV app (or the driver for the...

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for new pc hdtv tuner

Strengths: excellent for pci-e pc

Weakness: auto tuner, no QAM

I'm glad I did not have to waste my only two pci slots on my pc. I'm connecting this tuner to my roof hdtv antenna and wintv auto tuner could not pick up any channels even though it works fine with every hdtvs in my house. I ended up manually input the channel. wintv seriously needed to update and diagnose their software.

great hdtv card for pc with spare pci-e

Strengths: works with watchhdtv, price

Weakness: wintv software, mpeg1 software encode

I bought this capture card for only one purpose. to capture raw hdtv signal. with watchhdtv, this card has served me well with out any hiccups. I can only recommend this card to those who will ditch wintv;s useless software. their scheduler is a joke and using its built-in tuner takes forever to scan.