Hauppauge HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner White Box $79 AR

[cyberia]

Buy.com has the Hauppauge WINTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner on sale for $109 - $30 MIR with free shipping. This is a White Box package, so it does not include the remote and the IR blaster.

Features
* Watch and record two TV programs at the same time: two analog cable TV channels, two digital TV channels or one analog cable and one clear QAM digital cable TV channel.
* When recording analog cable TV, the dual built in hardware MPEG-2 encoders let your PC run at full speed.
* Watch and record 'clear QAM' digital TV. Clear QAM digital TV channels are TV channels which are broadcast "in the clear" on your cable TV network.
* Includes Hauppauge's WinTV v6 application, which allows you to watch analog cable TV, QAM and ATSC digital TV channels.

 

[NICKel]

LINK http://www.buy.com/prod/hauppauge-wi...208809706.html

 

[NICKel]

don't forget BING CASHBACK.....

 

[Basilisk]

Mine's been great running W7hp & pro; Vista MC sucked mightily,, on the other hand, but that's not the 2250's fault. I recommend the unit.


Keep in mind that this "OEM/White-Box" pkg doesn't come with a remote & rcvr. And note that not all remotes come with a rcvr if you order one elsewhere.

The remote's not necessary -- you can easily mouse the Pause/Resume/Forw/Back -- until you encounter double-letter-boxed movies -- SD/4:3 broadcasts with vert' letter-boxed programming which is then horiz' letter-boxed onto your HD/16:9 set. This is where you have a dead-zone all around the programming. At this point it's often nice to "ZOOM" your display so it makes the movie full-height/-width... but the mouse-able controls slip off-screen in so doing. A remote offers Pause, etc., w/o endless un-ZOOM-ing and re-Z-.

 

[dman]

Comcast is quickly phasing out analog cable (already done in some areas and inprogress / happening in others) and moving towards their own (non-qam) propietary digital encoding. Some local channels may still be usable via QAM (I'm not 100% certain).

I've read on Anandtech and elsewhere that this is the general direction of the industry, so, unless you are planning to use this for OTA recording the usable life may not be very long.

Our area hasn't converted over yet, so I don't have first hand knowledge of the impact-- but they are distributing the digital to analog boxes to our community now so the timeframe is very soon. I believe there may be some capability to use it with IR Blaster and the external boxes but ultimately I think the industry direction is towards cablecard.

 

[kalrith]

I've been using this with OTA for a year and LOVE it!

 

[pbroussard]

OOS, looking to get one of these for my HTPC build. Cox in our area still has locals in clear qam. I have an IR receiver from an older tuner card, may work, then I'll be using a Harmony remote and win7 MC. Friend who builds HTPC's says this is the card to get... have email alert for when they get back in stock.

 

[regpfj]

Good deal, OP.

I've got the pint-sized version of this, the 1250, in addition to two old pvr-150s, and one of the fantastic Hauppauge HD-PVRs. All four happily co-exist in my SageTV box running Vista Ultimate.

The OTA tuner on the 1250 gets almost 60% of the programs the wife and I watch regularly, one HD cable box through the HD-PVR, one SD box through PVR-150(1) and analog cable on PVR-150(2). Loads of fun.