Date: May 2, 2006 - Author: Greg King - Editor: Matthew Harris
If you are looking to build or upgrade your HTPC case, how could you exclude a TV card? The WinTV PVR-350 allows you to record live TV, pause it, and even burn it to a CD or DVD. It appears that this may be a true all-in-one solution, so let's check it out to see if that's the case.
There are many products made for PCs that aren't directed towards gamers at all. While we at Techgage focus primarily on gamers, we are tech heads to our very core. This calling that we follow can take us to so many places and allow us to tap the full potential of our computes. It is users, like you and I, that cannot be satisfied when our PCs run the latest games at ungodly resolutions with all the eye candy turned on provided by our dual GPU systems.
You know you are one of these people. Why have a computer strictly for gaming when it can do so much more. True, the majority of people use their computers for gaming, word processing or editing video or audio and because of users like these; the modern PC is a wealth of computing power just waiting to be explored. One such example is video. How so? Let me show you.
Today at the Techgage labs, we are taking a break from reviewing products for gamers and looking at a product that will allows us to make our PC something much more valuable then just a gaming machine.
We all have heard of TiVo. The concept is a brilliant yet simple idea. Data (TV signal) streams into your TiVo box and from there, into your TV. Along the way, the TiVo stores that data allowing you to rewind live television. This also allows you to pause live TV and resume when you see fit. This is a beautiful idea but why can't your PC do the same thing. This is where Hauppauge comes in.
Hauppauge is a global company providing TV capture cards, PVR cards and TV receivers for the PC community. With offices in Asia, Europe and North America, they have a good reach as well with the North American headquarters being located in New York.
Today we are taking a look at Hauppauge's flagship PVR card, the WinTV PVR-350. The 350, as stated earlier, is Hauppauge's top end PVR card and with MPEG encoding and decoding handled on the card, I am going to put it through its paces and see just how well it works.
There are a lot of programs that Hauppauge provides to anyone who purchases this product. Among them, there is the editing software and the actual programs that you will use to record/capture video, listen to FM radio and allow you to use your remote.
The packaging is what anyone would expect from a reputable hardware company. The box is colorful and full of enough information to give the possible buyer more than enough information to make an intelligent purchase.
Pretty straight forward and to the point but with more than enough information for anyone to make an educated call when considering purchasing the 350.
The inside of the packaging is also well done and secure.
You can see in the above picture that Hauppauge bundles more than enough "extras" for anyone that purchases this unit. There is the customary manual and driver CD along with the card itself. Also included is a RCA connectors, an FM antennae, an IR receiver and a remote. Throughout the review, I will be looking at the remote and all of the functionality of all of these items.
Let's take a look at the bundled items:
Here we see the FM antennae (pink) and the IR sensor. The FM antennae is connected with a coaxial screw on connector and the IR sensor plugs into the card with a plug similar to what a set of headphones would use.
You can see here, the RCA/S-Video input connector. This allows you to connect either a VCR, DVD player or virtually any other piece of hardware with video out that uses RCA jacks or S-Video.
The remote is setup nicely with numerous buttons for all sorts of uses. You can switch between TV, videos, music, pictures and radio. You also have all the buttons that any remote would have as well such as channel up and down, volume up and down, play, fast forward, rewind, play, stop, pause, skip up and down.
Here you have the very thorough manual and the driver disk.
Now let's take a look at the card itself:
In the above pictures, you can see the card in all its glory. From the pictures, you can see that the card is obviously using the PCI interface. There is also a good view of the TV, FM, S-Video, S-Video/Audio in, Line in and the IR jack. That's a fair amount of ports for the back of this card so let's see how it performs.
Before we get to the performance, let's take a look at the specs provided by Hauppauge themselves.
Also provided is a list, to you the end user, of all the features that the 350 provides.
WinTV-PVR-350 contains a highly integrated MPEG-1/2 hardware encoder and hardware MPEG-1/2 decoder. WinTV-PVR-350 uses the hardware MPEG encoder for watching live TV, for pausing live TV and for recording. The encoded MPEG-2 video is sent over the PCI bus, where it is stored on the PCs hard disk (for pause and record) and simultaneously decoded in software for display on the PC screen (in all modes). When playing recorded video onto an external TV monitor, the on-board hardware MPEG-2 video decoder is used. WinTV-PVR-350 supports three DVD quality profiles: DVD extra long play, DVD long play and DVD standard play. In addition, there are record profiles for SVCD and VCD formats, plus a "raw" 12Mbit/sec record.
Like I said earlier, this information was pulled right off Hauppauge's web page and can also be found on the 350's box.
Now that we have that out of the way, let's get into the 350 itself.
I have installed the 350 into my PC so let's take a look at this:
Here you can see the 350, snug between my lower 7800 GT and my Audigy 2 ZS sound card. I know that in this review it doesn't play a whole lot but here are my system specs:
Once I have all of the drivers and programs installed onto my hard drive, I am looking forward to playing with the 350 and seeing how well it performs. As a tech head and a gamer, I am constantly looking at my CPU resources. I am curious as to how much this 350 will affect my overall PCing experience when I am encoding a video. There is even a program that you can use to program your 350 to record certain shows and not others.
As it stands, I am a history nerd. The only TV I really ever watch is the History Channel, and ESPN to catch up on my beloved Indianapolis Colts, the Pacers and the St. Louis Cardinals. The majority of my time however is taken up by the History Channel. I also catch up on the news as much as I can but usually, time just doesn't allow me to watch the TV that I sometimes would.
Above you can see the starting screen for WinTV32. This is the program that you will use to watch TV, record TV and pause TV as you see fit. You can also snap screen shots with this program as well. Below are a few screen shots that I took using this program and are at a native resolution of 1280x1024.
While these aren't high def at all, they do look great when in motion on your monitor screen at full screen size.
Now we are going to take a look at the radio interface.
There isn't a whole lot to this program. You start it via the start button or with the remote. This brings up the pictured box where you can tune into any FM signal your normal radio picks up. This was nice but the reception was not what I would like to have had. My normal radio on my stereo does a much better job with reception but then again, it was designed for that specifically, the 350 was not built with FM in mind so this, to me, isn't a huge deal.
Recording is done in much the same way as the TV is done. You connect your VCR or DVD, and record it. It really is as simple as that. What was more impressive was the CPU usage in my tests. When I recorded a home movie from VCR to my hard drive, the CPU usage never went above 20% but once, when it peaked at 22%. This is something that I can certainly live with. I will update this review when I have a dual core system to compare it to but do note that this was conducted with a single core CPU. With overhead that low, I am able to continue to surf the Internet, play music or whatever else I would like to do and to me, that is nice. It allows me to increase my productivity and not force me to stop using my PC when it is encoding.
The follow picture was taken while I was recording a TV episode.
As you can see, the CPU usage level is at a respectable level and only spiked when I opened the program, started recording and did a screen capture. Other than those times, while it was sitting there recording, the average CPU usage was just under 20%. Not bad in my own honest opinion.
All in all, I am more than happy with this unit. I would like to eventually place this in my HTPC but that project is still underway so until then, it's living in my everyday gaming/work PC. This sits well with me considering that I use this PC all the time. I can sit down, browse the internet and keep up with all that is going on in the sports world and on my favorite channels.
All in all folks, you cannot go wrong with this unit. If you are working on a HTPC, as I am, this will compliment your PC nicely. Even if you are not building such a PC, this will work well with any PC, providing you have an open PCI slot. The only gripe I have had with this card is fact that it's only a PCI card but this isn't a huge deal because the main focus of this product will be, in my opinion, HTPC users who don't have a lot of other cards to take up space. The price is on the high side but you pay for what you get. This card is worth every penny when you take into consideration all that you are getting for what you are paying for.
I have no reservations in giving the Hauppauge WinTV-350PVR a solid 9 out of 10 as well as a coveted Editor's Choice. This is a card that I am looking forward to using for a long time to come. Go out and buy this card! TV on your PC FTW!
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