Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 TV Tuner Stick/Personal Video Recorder

Average customer rating: 4.0

Might work with your older laptop as well...
Needs a fast computer with good graphics
Good TV Tuner
Great tuner if you're willing to invest
ouch

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Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 TV Tuner Stick/Personal Video Recorder

Manufacturer: HAUPPAUGE
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B000J1CCGA

Related Categories:

All Video Capture & Editing Devices

All Video Capture & Editing Devices

TV Tuners

| Upgrades | Products |

Product Description

Watch and record cable TV or over-the-air HDTV on your desktop or notebook computer

Customer Reviews:

Might work with your older laptop as well..........2007-06-10

I bought this tuner in preparation for a two-week long camping trip down to Denver & back.. Didn't end up using it at all (given the choice between mountain biking in Moab and watching TV, I think you can guess which one won out), but I did experiment with it quite a bit before the trip and thought I should share my experiences.

My laptop is a Fujitsu S2010 that I've had for several years now. The processor is an Athlon XP 1700+ and I was very concerned that it wouldn't be able to handle the picture at all. Turns out I had a bit of reason to be concerned, but not as much as one would think. Everything in standard def worked flawlessly; hooked up to a powered antenna in the trailer, channels came in clear and everything looked great. Better still were the 480p digital channels that the tuner picked up; several local stations broadcast their standard broadcast in digital format and these were the best in terms of picture & sound quality. Once things stepped up to the true wide-screen high def format, though, all bets were off. The audio would still come in perfectly, but watching the show was like watching a slideshow as it was only every 10th frame or so of the video that would be displayed.

In short, this unit does work exactly as advertised, but keep in mind that it may or may not work for your older laptop/desktop depending on what you want to do with it. For me, it's a keeper as I get to watch all the standard def programming now and I'm sure I'll get a new laptop by the time all broadcasts get switched over to digital.

One last note: be sure to get the latest software install kit from the Hauppauge website! I did and didn't encounter a single problem with the install or the software.

Needs a fast computer with good graphics.......2007-06-04

The product documentation mentions needing a fast computer with good graphics. Take this seriously. It works OK on my 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 system with an nVidia 7600 GS graphics card. It does not work OK on my laptop (dual core Intel 1.8 GHz with integrated graphics). I think the graphics card and drivers matter a lot. The HVR-950 may not work well even on new computers if they have low-end graphics cards.

When it does work, the HDTV picture is clear and of good quality.

The software is not as stable as that of other Hauppauge products I have tried, in particular the PVR-150.

There appears to be a new version of the hardware out. The box refers to it as the HVR 950 version 2.3-us. The driver refers to HVR-980. The HVR-950 beta drivers on the Hauppauge web site did not work with the new hardware. All in all, this product appears to be a work in progress.

Good TV Tuner.......2007-05-19

This is an amazing TV Tuner. I live the HD TV quality over the air with this device and I highly recommend it if you are in range of HD antennas. If you are over 15 miles, it doesn't work as well, but it is worth the money.

Great tuner if you're willing to invest.......2007-05-15

This is a great tuner. I've been using the Hauppauge 150 (an analog tuner) for over a year now which worked pretty well for me, i just wasn't happy with the picture quality. So i decided to get a new computer and buy this HD stick. My computer, in case it helps, has 2 GB of RAM and the Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor.

I installed this for the first time and it didn't work, so I decided to take out my Analog tuner (the 150) and try again, and after restarting it worked pretty well. I found that if I touched the antenna, the reception was better and it didn't miss frames, which was a pain because I wasn't about to hold on to the antenna the whole time it recorded. So I went to radioshack and bought a better antenna for 25 bucks which works WAY better. Almost perfect reception now.

Everyone says that the program that comes with the tuner is buggy and crashes a lot and stuff, and I assumed that with a new computer it would be ok. It's NOT. The program that comes with the tuner is not great. I've been using it for my analog tuner, and it was alright, but definitely not what i was looking for since it doesn't automatically record favorites or anything like that. It also lays out the channels weird, and sometimes on startup doesn't even show the tuner at all. So I decided to try out one of the trial programs. I tried BeyondTV first, and found that the image was really dark. Then i tried SageTV which works great. The only problem I have is that it crashes every now and then while I'm watching a previously recorded show and taping something at the same time. It works just fine when it's only recording.

I found that using these third party programs is the only way to use my analog tuner at the same time as this HD tuner, so I guess I'm gonna have to upgrade from the trial.

As for using my computer's resources, it doesn't slow me down (although my computer is pretty fast to begin with). Right now I'm recording two shows, one on each tuner and my CPU usage is at 3% and my memory is at 38%, which is only slightly higher than when it idles.

So, if you want a good picture quality and don't mind spending extra $$$ on a new antenna and software, this is definitely a great tuner. Just don't expect it to work great out of the box.

ouch.......2007-05-14

I like the idea but have had several problems getting the live tv tuner to work. I would recomend an internal card if possible.

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Electronics

Electronics