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But even better, there is good support for this stick under Linux using the Video4Linux driver suite and KDE's Kaffeine media player. Next, launch kaffeine, select the stick dvb device (which appears as an LG Electronics dvb frontend), scan for your local channels, save your channel file, and start watching TV.I don't know why this unit is currently listed as $6 more than the newer 950Q (which supports viewing of cable clear QAM stations) or $10 more than the other 950 model with remote control - curious pricing structure.This stick is a good investment for a Linux-compatible device, and can also help save you money if you can only afford OTA broadcast TV. Purchased this unit four years ago to explore digital broadcast tv reception on desktop and notebook computers. Simply extract the stick's firmware from a driver file (available on-line), copy the firmware file to /lib/firmware, then download, build, and install the latest v4l source from linuxtv.org. Many other free software packages can be used with this stick to build inexpensive media centers, set-top boxes, or personal video recorders (I currently use my hvr-950 on my Asus Eee PC 1000 to watch digital TV - works great). This usb tuner stick came with a handy small portable antenna and several CDs of software for Windows (which I promptly threw away). This tuner stick will work out of the box under Mac OS X using the EyeTV software client.
Also made another TV program work too. This item made my Windows Media TV player work.
I don't fault this device for the poor picture quality for cable channels, it's probably the cable. The picture quality is not so great with my cable connection, but the digital over the air reception is excellent. I like this product. The installation went well. It actually works with Vista's Window Media Center too.
I'm sure this thing works on some computers, however it does not work on mine. I downloaded and re-installed drivers several times. But by now three months had passed. It did the same thing.
The tuner failed to work on digital channels. I will not buy this sort of thing through Amazon again, and I will certainly not buy anything from Hauppauge. He said he could only give me my money back if I had bought it in the last 30 days. It would lock up when I went from an analog channel to a digital channel.
I had been asking for my money back from the first email. I drove to Best Buy and bought a Pinnacle tuner.Tech support that wastes my time and is indifferent to failure is worse than none at all. I emailed their tech support. I returned the tuner by mail and they sent me a new one.
As many others have pointed out, the hardware works fine, but the software is very poor, even after installing the updates from the website (both in XP and Vista). VLC can handle the files but most players and transcoder applications will error out. Has no problems finding channels, in fact, the included antenna is quite good and has a slightly magnetic base. in fact, I had no problems getting up to 720p content to play on Athlon XP processors with no issues or visible dropped frames (even recording HD up to 720p seems to work OK on this slower hardware).
Also on those applications many of the menu items are very limited. In addition because of this Windows will crash when opening the video files directory. As others have pointed out using the "primary" application will solve stuttering issues with recording using the included software, but the problem will still exist with 3rd party software and media center. TitanTV integration is nice, in fact, seemingly the only way to reliably schedule a recording. The wintv32 and 2000 applications need quite a bit of tweaking to get the correct aspect ratio on your monitor. People rave about Hauppauge, but you would not know it from using this product.
I have not yet figured out how to solve this problem in Vista other than disabling preview. Overall the hardware seems to be fine, but even the most up to date software and drivers are very poor compared to other HDTV offerings on the market. Recordings take up a lot of space, as expected, but will play back on slower hardware. However the included software encoder introduces errors into the beginning of the files, which appear to be due to missing I frames; a fundamental problem that has not been fixed by Hauppauge drivers.
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