HDTV Reviews

Notebookreview has a great review of the new Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950, which is an USB 2.0 stick device that will turn your laptop into a ota HDTV viewer.

Just released a few weeks ago, the Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950 is a small, compact USB device that is capable of viewing and recording both SD and HD TV.

The first thing that I noticed about the HVR 950 is that it is a self powered USB device. It does not need an external power source to operate, and also comes with a small TV Antenna that is capable of receiving SD (NTSC) and HD (ATSC) over-the-air signals. It is also capable of receiving other NTSC signals, which allows me to view the cable at my apartment as well.

Anyway, I found that for standard TV, the HVR 950 required about 45-50% of the CPUs power. That is a fairly significant percentage given the power of the Core 2 at 2.16 GHz. But it does its job well, so I am not going to complain. Clearly, this TV Tuner uses software based decoding, but as long as you have a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo processor you should be fine. Based on my previous experience with software based TV tuner a Pentium M or lesser CPU would choke.

High Definition TV was another matter entirely. When using the standard antenna to receive over-the-air HDTV, it required as much as 75% of my Core 2 (2.16 GHz) processor’s power. Clearly, decoding live HDTV is a beast of a task, and one task that you would probably need a T2500/T7200 processor to successfully run with some head room to spare for additional background programs.

The Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950 USB2 is a TV Tuner that gives hope to the masses of people that have non-Media Center PCs. It is fairly compact, and provides both a quality SDTV and HDTV experience to the end user. Despite the fact that the DVR software is a little quirky, the Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950 TV Tuner is a very good investment for media enthusiasts. Overall, this unit is more than worth the expense, and its strengths far outweigh any weaknesses in its software.