The company with the difficult to spell name has delivered another winner with the WinTV PVR500 MCE. In the world of TV cards and DIY PVR’s the ability to get your hardware working well with your PVR software is essential and Hauppauge has long been known to be supported by the largest variety of PVR packages, and I can happily say now from personal experience that its all true.

I successfully tested the PAL version of the 500 on GB PVR, Media Portal and Show Shifter. I ran out of time before I could test it on MythTv but I’d guess that you’d have a good chance of it working there as well.

The dual tuners are a godsend when to want to record things, although I’m running it next to my digital tuner at the same time, and in terms of picture quality and sound you still can’t beat digitial, but none the less compared to some of the other analogue cards I’ve tried its first rate.

The official specs as follows:
Dual 125 channel cable ready TV tuners, each with a dbx-TV stereo decoder (Nicam stereo decoder in Europe)
Dual high quality MPEG2 video and audio encoders based on the Conexant -416 MPEG encoder
One back panel composite/s-video plus stereo audio inputs to connect to cable or satellite set top boxes
Two on-board A/V headers, to connect to two more A/V sources (A/V cable set not included)
One FM radio receiver

Being an MCE edition it doesn’t come with a remote, in my case I went and bought an MCE remote to compliment it. My only real problems have been with the FM reception, I don’t have an external antenna point spare for the FM slot and the internal one wasn’t that impressive, and it wasn’t compatible with GB PVR (worded on Media Portal) but having said that I listen more to streamed radio from Club 977 the 80’s channel now then I do local radio anyway, and there’s a lot less ads.

I’m happy to recommend this one. Outside of the US shop around though because the retail prices are excessive and you can order directly from the Hauppauge website for a good price.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 1:16 pm and is filed under DIY PVR, Hauppauge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.