Average Rating:
Rating: - PVR 250; Good recording, so-so playback and bad live TV
I purchased the PVR-250 to edit home videos, record TV shows and watch TV.

I've found the PVR to be good for recording home videos, okay for recording TV and insufficient for watching TV.

I have a 1.2GHz Celeron CPU and 192MB of RAM. The hardware encoding does fine, but the software decoding takes up 100% of my CPU. When I watch TV, the picture is jumpy because the CPU can't keep up. Also, when watching TV, it can 60 seconds to click on other windows since the CPU is completely occupied. For this reason, the pausing Live TV feature is not useful on my machine. It takes too long to open the live TV controls and click the pause button. In addition, the jumpiness of the picture makes my head hurt. I don't watch TV on this card. The box says 733MHz minimum for watching TV, but my 1.2GHz just dies. I recommend at least 1.7GHz to handle live and pause TV.

Recording TV is okay, although by default, the TV watching window is on when recording. I had to get a registry editor script from Hauppage to turn off the window. I'm not sure why you can't click a button to turn off the window and the computationally intensive software decoding. (In general the software for this product is not user friendly, it's poorly thought out. I haven't found any bugs though.) With the window and decoding off, I can record programs in the background on my computer, using only 30% of the CPU. Watching those programs later is fine, the picture problems are only with live TV.

Recording home videos works great. They stream to the computer and can be stored in a variety of formats from 12MB/sec down to .6MB/sec. There are a couple cute built-in programs to cut and past mpegs and add-in background audio to a video. Also there's a simple program to burn files to a DVD or VCD. There isn't much software for serious audio or video editing. There's no changing colors or distorting the picture or filtering the audio, just cut and splice.

Overall, the product is good for my main use of storing VHS on my computer. The live TV is poor, but I shouldn't watch TV much anyway. = ) Software is hard-to-use, but it does what I need it to do for recording shows and burning VCDs.

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Rating: - Great TV Tuner Card
I have had the PVR-250 on my computer (2.7GhZ, 1GB RAM) for about 3 months and have recorded numerous products on my hard drive that, after editing, I have burned to DVD. Very good quality DVD's with very little in the way of dropped frames (it does happen from time to time). I plan to try to hook up a VCR to the card and capture some old VCR footage to see how it compares to my current capture card. The TV quality is very good and the TV Scheduler is very reliable. The TV Titan website is tied to the scheduler, so you just have to go to the website, click on the program name and the scheduler sets itself up for you. Very nice. I don't like that the TV doesn't close out once recording is done, so I have to make sure my speakers are off if I record something in the middle of the night. All in all, this is a great product.

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Rating: - Software has issues
The included software has issues.

The versions on the CD that comes with the package will NOT work with Windows 2000. You have to get the latest versions off of their website to get this to work.

The included TV sofware caches 1-2 seconds to the hard drive and plays back from that. This renders it nearly impossible to play console video games on it and also causes severe playback issues if you have a slow hard drive, like I do.

My biggest issue is that the audio and video get out of sink very easily. If I watch TV in full screen mode, then the audio and video will get out of sink within a couple of minutes. This should not happen, no matter how slow my hard drive is.

It is easy to use to record programs, and the recording is excelent, but that just doesn't make up for software that doesn't even play the TV right.