Digital Trends

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250

July 23rd, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Installation and Setup

Installing the WinTV-PVR-250 is fairly straightforward and simple, but it does take a bit of time to install all of the drivers and applications. There are separate installations for the remote control drivers, the TV tuning software, the capture card drivers and the additional software bundled with the unit. WinTV 2000 is the application that handles live TV viewing as well as the PVR functions.

Once you install the card in the PCI slot, install the software and plug your cable TV wire into the card, you allow WinTV to scan for channels. With the channels added to you lineup, you are able to use the remote control, mouse, or keyboard to navigate through the channels and watch TV. There is a slight lag associated with changing the channel but it is not a big concern.

Watching and Recording TV

WinTV allows you to watch TV in full-screen or windowed mode. If you are using your PVR-250 equipped computer as a workstation, windowed mode allows you to work in other windows while still watching TV. The application works like any other windowed application, allowing you to resize and move live TV at will. Resizing is as easy as dragging a corner or side, and by default the application will always keep the correct aspect ratio even if you only drag one side. One thing that may be annoying to some users is the fact that the remote control only works when the WinTV application is the active window. So, if you are working on a document in one window while watching TV in another, you must first click on the WinTV application before you change channels.

There are onscreen controls for changing the channels, pausing and recording TV and most other normal PVR functions. One nice feature of WinTV is the ability to take screenshots of live TV or any input that you may be viewing. The system allows six different image sizes, from 320x250 all the way up to 1600x1200 and stores them as .JPG files.

The WinTV 2000 application allows you to record and pause live TV.

We tested the Hauppauge WinTv-PVR-250 in two different PCs: one with an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ and 512MB of RAM and the other with an AMD Athlon XP 2800 Barton with 1024MB of RAM. The difference between the two was noticeable as the slower processor took quite a hit while watching and recording TV — with utilization anywhere between 50 to 80 percent. CPU usage in the system with the 2800+ was much lower and it handled multitasking much better. This is not to say that a system with lower specifications will not be able to handle watching TV and doing other tasks, but performance will be noticeably lower. Hauppauge lists the minimum specifications for the PVR-250 as a 733MHz or faster processor for full screen playback and pausing but that may be pushing the limits.

One thing that WinTV is lacking is a robust scheduling feature. Scheduling is done by channel and time only — meaning you have to know what time and channel the programs you want to watch and record are on. Hauppauge has addressed this by bundling the PVR-250 with TitanTV's web-based scheduling application. TitanTV is a robust scheduling program with advanced recording features and an excellent search function that works well in conjunction with WinTV.