Digital Trends

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250

July 23rd, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Watching and Recording TV (continued)

Pausing live TV is as simple as hitting the pause button on the remote control. There is, however, a slight lag associated with the pausing as it takes a few seconds to initialize the feature. The lag is only two or three seconds, but it happens when pausing and when resuming live TV, which may make you miss a few seconds of your program. WinTV allows you to set the size of your “pause buffer” at any size up to 1000MB. Likewise it allows you to set the quality and size of your recordings and pause buffer.

WinTV 2000 allows you to easily set the pause buffer size and the quality of recordings.

MPEG-2 video can be recorded at a number of settings and as high as 12Mbit per second. Recording quality is dependent on what the desired use of the video is and most importantly, how much hard drive space you have. High-quality recordings of complete shows will take up quite a bit of space, as full screen TV will take up about 2GB per hour. Playback quality is excellent, and it is hard to tell the difference between live TV and recorded shows at the highest quality settings.

Full recording specifications are as follows:

• MPEG1 recording at 1150K bits/sec (Video CD data rate) 
• MPEG2 record datarates: 2MBit/sec, 4MBit/sec, 6Mbit/sec, 8Mbit/sec, 12Mbit/sec.
• Selections for DVD Standard play (8MBitsec), DVD Long Play (4MBit/sec) and DVD Extra Long Play (2MBit/sec) 
• NTSC format at 29.97fps: Full D1: 720x480, MPEG1: 352x240 
• PAL format at 25fps: Full D1: 720x576, MPEG1: 352x288
• Audio capture formats: 32/44.1/48 KHz, 16bit stereo, 192/224/384Kbits/sec 
• Chroma sampling: YUV 4:2:0 
• Video file format: .MPG

Recorded programming can be played back on your computer, transferred to another device or recorded to a DVD. We had no compatibility issues with the MPEG-2 recordings from the WinTV-PVR-250 when we burned DVDs with Ulead's MediaStudio and DVD Movie Factory.