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| Date Reviewed: 07/21/2005 |
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Strengths: Great for future upgrades, so I can keep this dual-tuner function while upgrading to the next best vid-card.
Weaknesses: A little large, but it is 2 tuners. The quality could be better, but it doesn't matter since I compress my footage to save space.
Summary: I have a micro-ATX case, and needed to save space. Well to keep my PCI slots open more, I bought one of these. It's definitely worth it in my opinion. I'm hoping MCE XP could soon use 3 tuner cards to record more than 2 shows at once. Prime time is a killer! So, stop being a slave to the commercials and get back control of your time. 20 minutes an hour of commercials?? Forget that! No wonder Harry Potter was on TV for 4 hours: 8 min commercial breaks! Bu-bye commercials, hello PVR!
 100% of People (7/7) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 10/05/2005 |
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Strengths: Easy setup, no splitter needed for second tuner, works as advertised
Weaknesses: No remote
Summary: From looking at the pictures, I thought the 2 coax - looking inputs were for each tuner. They're not - the top one connects to an antenna they provide for the radio, and the bottom connects to a cable source. I'm using this card with Fedora Core 3 and MythTV 0.18.1. Installation was almost flawless. The only catch is that the ivtv driver includes modules that are also provided by the main kernel. I also have a bttv card, and it stopped working when I used the ivtv version of the modules. When I switched to the kernel modules, both cards started working perfectly. Some people are using different versions of the card's firmware - the one on the installation cd works fine for me. Video quality on the coax inputs is excellent. I haven't tried the composite, svideo, or radio yet.
100% of People (4/4) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 02/06/2006 |
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Strengths: Too many to list.
Weaknesses: I haven't had any issues. Would like to see a better radio program and some 3rd party support for FM.
Summary: I love this thing. I traded in my two 150mce's so I could free up a PCI slot and get rid of the cable splitter. Love the product. Very versital as it works with many third party programs. I use it with sage and the mediamvp. Works great.
100% of People (1/1) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 09/17/2005 |
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Strengths: Works under Linux with little trouble! Great price for a dual tuner card - it's like getting two PVR 150s in only one PCI card!
Weaknesses: Signal is split at the connector (the other coax input is for FM radio), so noise on your coax is amplified to both tuners.
Summary: I did lots of reading on how to build your own DVR with spare parts, so I decided to take the plunge. Taking a P4 Northwood, an Intel 875P retail desktop board, with some extra 512MB of DDR400 ram, 1 30GB HD and 1 60GB, a CDRW, and a Soundblaster Live! soundcard I had spare, I threw all the components in a P4 compatible case. I did plenty of research on the best Linux distributions for MythTV (www.mythtv.org, which seems to be the most robust software solution out there for Linux based DVRs) and settled on KnoppMyth. Once I burned the ISO to CD, I popped it in the CDRW and away the install went. To make a long story short, without too much trouble the system not only recognized the PVR 500 out of the box, but I was up and running watching live tv in less than 5-6 hours. This sounds like a long time, but for those who know Linux (or just enough to be dangerous like me!) realize it takes a while to compile missing drivers, configure things you way you like them, etc. I am sure this card works as advertised in Windows Media Center Edition, I just didn't want to shell out the extra $$$ for the OS!
I have read the video quality (output) of this card might not be as good as the 250 or 350 model, but it does the job for me as I am quite happy with the video quality - it's not DVD MPG4 but an encoded then decoded MPG2 stream after all. Definitely don't hesitate to purchase this board - you won't be disappointed! If *I* can get it to work, then you can, too!
95% of People (18/19) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 03/03/2005 |
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Strengths: Picture Quality, Radio, 2 tuners
Weaknesses: If you listen to the radio you can only use 1 TV tuner at the same time.
Summary: This is a great product. Its TV quality is excellent. Watching a TV show while recording another one or recording two at once is awesome. The only downside to this product that I have encountered is that when you are listening to radio you can only use one of the TV tunes at the same time.
93% of People (14/15) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 09/11/2005 |
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 Hauppauge PVR-500MCE Strengths: Cost, features, Connectorization
Weaknesses: Support
Summary: 2005-10-21 21:41:45 I purchased a couple of these to use in my MCE2005 machines... I had a PVR-250 before, and was reasonably happy with it, and I felt a dual tuner card was the only way to go.
Initially I was very happy with the card. I like the fact that it has RCA connectors on the card for a solid connection should I want to hook it up to an external cable receiver (though you can only hook up one of the channels without an adapter kit that's really hard to fine)... but I only cared about the tuners anyway...
The card worked fine for awhile, but then a Microsoft update seemed to cause one of the two tuners to have no audio (the second tuner)... and then's when I became less happy with it.
The Hauppauge people tried -- but they really didn't have any tools to readily help diagnose the problem -- and installe BeyondTV & SageTV to help diagnose an interaction with an OS the card was designed to work with just seems ridiculous.
I eventually just bought nVidia based dual tuner cards -- which are still working perfectly.
My guess is that you probably won't have the audio problems, and will be happy with this card... but if you do have problems with it -- you're pretty much going to be on your own to fix them.
83% of People (5/6) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 09/03/2005 |
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Strengths: Works seemlessly with Win MCE 2005. Two built-in TV tuners plus dual hardware MPEG encoders. Watch one TV channel while recording another. Or record two TV channels and watch a recorded show at once!
Weaknesses: As far as I know it only works with Microsoft Media Center 2005 only.
Summary: AAAAA +++++ Installed in a flash and works perfect! Literally turned off PC, pluged the card in, put the Cable on and turned on the PC. Installed the driver and let Windows Media Center configure the tuner card. In 5 minutes we were recording 2 different channels at the same time and watching a previously recorded show.
The system seems to run better vs just using the ATI AIW 9600 card (I have installed). It did not take additional CPU or memory either. Changing the channels and viewing the guide (channel surfing) is alot faster. I believe the hadware tuner vs. the software solution the ATI AIW uses is far superior. NOTE: You will still need a video card. This only allows you to receive a TV and Radio signal.
For the WinMCE 2005 users who would like have dual TV tuners this works flawlessly! What are you waiting for. Go Get It!
67% of People (2/3) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 07/11/2005 |
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Strengths: The PCI card comes with two onboard MPEG-2 encoder chips, produces excellent image qualities and user has the ability to pause live TV
Weaknesses: The model is primarily made to complement with Microsoft Windows MCE, thus for regular XP, external software is needed
Summary: The PVR 500 card contains two hardware MPEG-2 encoding chips and thus does not use much CPU .. it ranged from 11% to 18% CPU usage while watching Live TV.
This card also produces excellent image quality. But if you do not have the Media Center Edition of Windows, be prepared to get third party software .. I had excellent results with Beyond TV - which supports simultaneous recordings which this card is capable of.
60% of People (3/5) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 01/09/2006 |
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 Nice Hardware - Don't Expect it to work Strengths: Good image quality / sound
Weaknesses: No support AT ALL. Hauppauge personel will tell you this card is for OEM and use that excuse to let you down.
Summary: Installed the card in a clean Windows MCE 2005 setup.
Installed all the latest drivers, bios updates, ...
The Card drivers keeps on deinstalling.
With no help from the vendor you're just bying a lotery ticket. Some will be lucky but you don't know.
Given the sub-par support quality : Avoid at all costs.
50% of People (2/4) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 06/06/2005 |
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Strengths: Record 2 shows at once.
Weaknesses: Requires 3rd party software to work on any version of windows other than MCE.
Summary: This is one great TV tuner. Actually 2 tuners. If it had pvr software for Windows XP it would be even better. I did know in advance i would need a 3rd party software package to use this though. Might purchase another so i can record 4 shows at once.
50% of People (2/4) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 02/16/2006 |
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Be Aware : you may receive a white box without A/V Adapter cable.
Strengths: two tunners
Weaknesses: Missing A/V Adapter Cable
Summary: Be aware that there are two white boxes in the market. One is older and there is no A/V Adapter cable for your Svideo input.
So please make sure that you have a A/V adapter cable in the box or purchase other brands which work fine two.
This is their reply :
" I'm sorry that you feel that way but it states specifically
that it does not include one. It is not a defect or missing
part it was how the model was sold. Also we still do sell a oem which is what you purchased only the kit comes with the cable
set. So it is not people after a certain point lose out
it is based on the model you purchased. "
50% of People (1/2) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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| Date Reviewed: 05/29/2006 |
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less than amazing
Strengths: Two Tuners giving the ability to record two shows at the same time.
Weaknesses: signal quality
Summary: I bought this card because it was on sale and i wanted a dual tuner card. My previous card was a PVR-250-MCE which was flawless. Going to this PVR-500-MCE was a quality step down. There are lines across the screen, sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal. But, they are always there. They arent too noticeable, but enough to be distracting. I tried different drivers and even moving the card to a different MCE machine that i have. Same problem always. I'll go back to my single tuner PVR-250-MCE.
0% of People (0/1) found this review helpful. Was this review helpful or unhelpful for you?
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