Hauppauge WinTV HVR 850 TV Tuner Analog USB Windows Vista/XP USB CD-ROM Black

This small, relatively inexpensive (compared to others on the market) external T.V. tuner does exactly what I expected. I purchased it to use on my Windows 7 desktop - we have a 37 inch T.V. in the family room but I wanted to be able to record shows and be able to watch T.V. in the background while doing other things on my computer. We don't have cable, so I am just using it with a pair of rabbit ears. I picked a cheap pair up for less than five bucks on amazon along with the tuner - the "Zenith VN1ANTP1 Indoor Passive VHF/UHF Antenna", found here - [...]. The tuner software is perfectly fine, but I choose to use Windows Media Center. The included software looks very utilitarian in comparison, and I only used it once. I chose Windows Media Center because of the more streamlined interface, plus the T.V. listings appear along with the channel, making it easier to record. The tuner seems to work just as well as the one in our Panasonic T.V. It doesn't pick up one fairly weak channel our amplified antenna connected to the T.V. does, but I think that the positioning of my computer and the fact that my little cheap antenna is un-amplified are the cause of this. One thing not listed in the product description is that this tuner does pick up F.M. radio. Also, the newer box for the tuner has the "compatible with Windows 7" logo on it, but as most people who purchased this tuner seem to be using it with 7, that is not surprising. The "portable antenna" included with this product is a joke, I never even hooked it up to the tuner. It is less than a foot long, and a waste of plastic and box space. Buy a cheap antenna like I did and you will be much happier with your tuner. Overall, it does what it should and for 55 bucks it is nice to have another T.V.

My situation...Windows 7 64bit on 4-year-old Dell Latitude D630 with analog cable service. Also, have a 22" LCD monitor and 30" tube CRT TV. Factoring all this in, I decided on this make/model. It works great with Windows Media Center. The WinTV software is "OK" but it would give choppy streaming at times and it can't compete with Media Center's TV guide and ease of recording.I have also used the provided HDTV antenna and am absolutely amazed at how well broadcast hdtv looks on my LCD. Recordings in HD are just as good, just make sure you have plenty of hard drive available. Viewing analog cable on my widescreen LCD monitor isn't that nice. But my intent is to watch the analog cable recordings on my tube TV and they look much better on the tube, just like watching my live cable programming. HDTV recordings viewed on the CRT tube look wonderful as well.I bought this device to record World Cup soccer games over analog cable but after doing some test recordings, I was not happy with the results. All the action on the field looks fine except whenever the camera pans, the white sidelines and on-field lines jump around and it's really distracting to me. So I will be watching my WC2010 recordings on good old VHS! Any other analog cable playback on the CRT looks just fine (Fox News, NHL, Golf, Movies, MLB, etc.). But for some reason on soccer games the sidelines "dance". Maybe one day I'll upgrade to digital cable!So I will keep this device I guess if I want to start recording over-the-air HDTV because that's where this thing really shines for my situation. I had no issues with drivers and what-not. It was a cinch to setup and start using with either the provided software or the free Win7 Media Center. I don't think I read any instructions, everything just worked.If you have analog cable and want to use a CRT for viewing then this is a good buy. Just don't bank on it for soccer games. If you have HDTV over the air or digital cable and use a LCD/Plasma for viewing, this will certainly work well for you as well. Just note that you cannot run this device in over-the-air mode and cable/satellite mode at the same time...because there is only one coax connector for both of those services to share. I guess you could try using a coax Y-splitter but if you use Windows Media Center, you have to run through a configuration wizard anytime you want to toggle between cable vs. antenna mode input. This would become irritating if you had to do this very often.

The tuner sensitivity is awesome! I had never tried to receive over the air broadcasts before, I had now idea that I could pick up any stations in my area. I cannot believe how good the ATSC 1080 recordings look. I discovered Freemake (do a web search for it) and that has made trimming/converting/compressing the multi-gigabyte .TS files easy. Here is the downside, I have found the included software to be very bug prone. I installed this on an older XP machine as a dedicated DVR machine and originally there were some bugs with the user interface and about 1 out of 5 recordings would not turn out (in other words the recorded file would be corrupt for some reason). I recently installed a newer version of the software from the mfg. website. It appears to have a more stable user interface and no corrupt files so far. A new bug seems to be that now it fails to record some of the scheduled programs. The recording icon will appear in the windows system tray, but it will only save a 0 kB file. It appears to be that if recordings are scheduled back to back, then the very first scheduled recording is most likely to fail. I have found that creating a "sacrificial recording" seems in increase the chances that the recordings will be successful. Let me explain, if I want to record from 7:00-8:00, then I also schedule a separate recording for 6:55-7:00. This 5 minute recording immediately before the first real scheduled recording will often turn out to be a 0 kB file but then the other recordings will be fine.In summary, if not for these issues I would give it 4 or 5 stars. Perhaps other users are not seeing the same issues. As I said it is running on an older machine I suppose that on a more modern machine these issues may not arise. Basically I have not minded putting up with it because it is about the cheapest option available and it has pretty much just been recording shows for my kids to watch.

First and foremost you must have straight shot at the broadcast towers and get good reception for any tuner and software to work right.In my old house in Carefree Arizona I had a straight shot at the broadcast towers that are on South Mountain in Phoenix about 45 miles away. Even though the distance was far, I could see South Mountain on a clear day and got most of the channels clearly with just a $12 pair of rabbit ears.Now I live in West Mesa Arizona which is only about 15 miles from the broadcast towers. I don't get nearly as many channels clearly because there is a 3 story building in the way, (same tuner, same rabbit ears).The old Hauppauge software could crash while trying to change channels to a channel that does not come in clearly. I have used version 1.8, 2.0 and now am using 2.4 which has not crashed on me yet. You don't have to use the Hauppauge software! You can use the device directly with Windows Media Center.I also own an AverMedia USB tuner, that I bought on Amazon and is also about $50. It comes with no software and runs with Windows Media Center only. I would rate these two devices about the same when used with Windows Media Center.Windows Media Center is much more user friendly software and does not crash. It also lets you find out the signal strength of each station you are interested in and displays the signal strength graphically. You can then adjust your rabbit ears to get the best position for the stations you want. (every broadcast tower is located in a different place.)I like to record my programs with the Hauppauge WinTV software, convert the MPEG-2 TS files to XviD AVI format, edit out the commercials and save them on my 8TB MediaSonic file server JOBD box. You can't do that with the WTV files that Windows Media Center creates! You need the Hauppauge sofware that only comes with the Hauppauge device.For my Hauppuge tuner I use Windows Media Center for setting up my rabbit ears using the signal strength wizard and sometimes use the program listing search features to find shows. When I find a show I want to record and keep, I go outside Media center to TitanTV.com and click on the show there and select record which downloads a little file that the Hauppauge WinTV softare uses to schedule the recording.After the recording is made I convert the Hauppauge TS file to an XviD file with the TS2AVI script which I wrote. This free script that is well tested and runs on Windows.Just google "ts2avi robert maul hauppauge" to find it in the Avidemux forum pages.you will need to also download: Winff, Project-X, Avidemux, and MinGW (use google to find them too)

I purchased a WinTV-850 about a year ago and had used it successfully in both my computers, one in FL & one in WI. I forgot the unit when I had to return to WI unexpectedly, so I purchased the same model.When it arrived I spent about 4 hrs trying to get it to work. The new one had WinTV-7 with in it, not WinTV-6 as the first one. WinTV-7 locked up my computer during the install, finally said it was finished and then started to install again and crashed. I re-booted the computer and it was installed but quality of audio and video was bad, always breaking up. I tried VLC media player and I got acceptable reception but no recording capability which was the main reason I bought it.The next day I spent about 6 hrs off and on with a Service Tech at Hauppauge. He suggested re-install WinTV6, he e-mailed me a copy and I installed it. The install couldn't find a driver. I called the Tech and he had found that the 850 hardware/firmware had been changed to work with Windows 7, and it wouldn't work with WinTV-6 anymore. He suggested un-install that and re-install 7 again.I did during which I had a couple lock-up problems and then called him back. He worked with me non stop for an hour or two. He tried to change thing in the setup to make it work, crashed my computer a few times when I had to power down the computer to get it to reset. He had me set up to log what was happening and had me e-mail him the files for him to give the engineer to try to find out the problem. That was three days ago and nothing yet. I returned the unit today.I felt the Service Tech did every thing he could with what he had to work with.