Hauppauge HVR-1800 ATSC/NTSC dual tuner

Hauppauge is a familiar brand for anybody who has ever owned a TV Tuner card, as they are perhaps the most familiar brand when it comes to TV Tuners.  Recently, TV Tuners have moved into the digital and High Definition (HD) world, and Hauppauge has not been one to miss the boat.  With a rich history of tuners like the PVR-150/350 cards, which are arguably the most used TV Tuner cards for home made Home Theatre PCs (HTPCs), they have some serious experience in the market.

Overview

The HVR-1800 is essentially an HVR-1600 with a PCIe x1 connector instead of the classic PCI.  It is a dual tuner card, which has an ATSC/QAM and classic NTSC tuner.  The digital tuner supports up to 1080i reception through either an antenna or from your cable provider (if the QAM channel is not encrypted).  The analog tuner is also able to tune to FM Stations.


The HVR-1800 Media Center Kit we bought came with the following parts:

 


We had only a couple of issues with the physical installation of the card.  One problem was that we could not get it to fit into an abit AB9-Pro motherboard, this was due to a capacitor being in the way on ther motherboard and the video card heatsink blocking the other PCI x1 slot.  While it is arguable who is at fault there, the card inputs are rather close to the motherboard, and the motherboard had a capacitor placed in the wrong place.  We've had this issue with some AGP boards before, so as a rule of thumb the manufacturers of PCI/PCIe cards should take this into account.

Remote

The remote that came with the system is a classic newer Vista MCE remote.  It has a great design and is extremely responsive like you would expect on a TV.  This is a great step up from the old PVR-150 remote, which had quite a noticeable delay and reception issues.  The IR base transmitter/receiver works out of the box on Windows Vista, and had no issues during testing.  You get 2 IR transmitters to control 2 set top boxes.


The card has a number of inputs as well:



Software

The software provided with the card (WinTV, FM tuner, etc) is pretty barebones.  While it can record, it is quite buggy and painfully slow.  It seems that the card really does not like the software, and causes systemwide  software slowdowns while scans and channel changes are taking place.  One big caveat about the card is the fact that  you must use the WinTV software for watching QAM channels, as Windows Media Centre does not yet support QAM natively.  We were not able to use WinTV to watch QAM channels, as the scan would take hours and would not find a single channel.

Using Windows Vista MCE, we had no problems using this card to watch HD television.  The image quality was very good at both 1080i and 720p over ATSC, but seemed not to match the picture quality of our trusty Airstar Air2PC ATSC card from way back.

We were not able to use the card in MCE to do both analog and digital reception, as MCE would not be able to find any analog channels.  However, the system we tested the card in had an addition PVR-150 NTSC tuner, which may have caused some sort of conflict (it did not have any issues).

We were also not able to set up the card to recieve FM in MCE, as adding it as an FM tuner would remove it as a TV tuner!  This may just be a MCE issue, but I believe it to be a driver issue.

To be fair, the included FM tuner software and WinTV were able to tune to ATSC, NTSC, and FM channels without any issues.


Value

The whole kit was $90 CAD/USD, which is quite a bargain for a dual tuner with an original MCE remote.


 Conclusion

While the HVR-1800 MCE kit is a great bang for the buck, it has some very serious driver bugs.  The hardware itself is excellent, and we highly recommend it.  However, if you plan to use all the features of this card, you will find that the drivers have issues which may prevent you from using all of them.


Score

Value: 9/10

Reception and quality: 9/10

Software/Drivers: 5/10

Overall: 6/10


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