PVR Card Choice/Hauppauge 500?

[benfanti]

I have seen read some very negative opinions lately of the hauppauge 500 pvr card. It seems that they have recently changed chip sets and that the performance is subpar for many.

I don't have any experience with this card (I currently use the Hauppauge USB2 PVR2), but was looking to buy a PCI tuner/PVR card for my PC.

What are the general suggestions out there now? Does anybody have experience with RECENT versions of the 500 or 150? Should I be concerned about performance? Is there a "better" option?

Thanks in advance.

[Braklet]

I bought my PVR-500 card in February. Not sure if this has different Conexant guts to what is shipped today. It works great with composite or S-video input. Also works great with GB-PVR. I use it to interface my DBS receiver with my PC.

I also have a PVR USB2 and video/audio quality wise the two devices are very similar.

PVR-500 NTSC reception is very dodgy, however. Audio is constantly low level and very noisy, regardless of how strong the signal is (i.e. low signal and high signal stations have the same noisy sound). This could be an interference issue, but it is a PCI card for cripes sake. Of course there is EMR within a computer case.

I just added an ATSC receiver to my HTPC (AVerTVHD MCE A180) and I couldn't be happier. Now my OTA stations come in crystal clear, and I can even record the HD streams (man that slurps up some HDD space . The card does not contain a hardware MPEG2 encoder so I'm ignoring the composite/S-video inputs.

[hasso]

I've got both the PVR350 and the PVR500MCE. I can see a noticeable difference in quality. Don't know what chipsets, but the 350 has better reception quality than the 500.

[kaffeen]

I've got a 150 that works beautifully at the moment (with GBPVR), however, I had to return two cards before I got a working card (third time is a charm?).

I got the first card about three months ago, the third card (which I have installed) came with a faulty IR blaster (which I returned and their technical support sent me a replacement that had been tested).

My experience,

1) When it works, it works pretty good
2) Hauppauge has some serious QA/build issues (but, to be fair, most all do).
3) Probably the most widely documented card out there (and tested with various PVR software successfully). This is the reason I chose Hauppauge.

[Braklet]

the 350 has better reception quality than the 500.

I will say that my 500s NTSC reception both sucks and blows, which is quite a feat. That was a primary motivation in getting an ATSC receiver (AVerTVHD if you care).

My 500s composite/S-video encoding is flawless, however.

[Carlito]

My 150 does fairly well. A few channels come in fuzzier then I'd like (they come in fine through the tv tuner off of the same cable ) but other then that it has been a breeze to work with and setup.

[TheBosZ]

I'd just like to chime in and say what I have and how it works for me.

I started off with just a 250, which was fine. But by the time we realized that we needed two tuners, the 150 was out. So I got a 150MCE and I couldn't tell a difference between the two's recordings (except for NBC for some reason, but it was a noisy channel anyway).

We just moved and got access to Expanded basic (72 channels instead of 12) so we got a 500. I just got it working the other day, and I do notice a drop in quality. But it seems to be across the whole system. So I'm going to hookup a powered amplifier before the splitter and hope that helps.

[ike]

I started with a 350, which worked great. I added a 500MCE and picture quality became horrible on all 3 tuners. Very red and washed out. I thought it must be the splitter, so i tested each card separately, without the splitter. Problem still existed. Played with the hauppauge tweak tool and only made it worse. Tried to adjust the 500 and the 350 would get way out of wack. Using the tweak tool, I reset everything back to defaults, figuring I would go back to piss-poor from god-awful. Now everything looks perfect! All 3 tuners get a beautiful picture (350 is very slightly better IMO.) I don't know wtf happened, but I'll have to stop messing with it here and thank my lucky stars.