If you've recently purchased a TV QAM tuner from Hauppauge and it came with a CD containing drivers and apps, do not throw it away thinking you can get the latest from their website. I recently had a mega clear out of all sorts of old CD's including about a dozen Hauppauge CD's for the various Hauppauge HW I have owned or still use. Hauppauge in their 'wisdom' now require you to have the original CD available if you wish to upgrade to latest apps. So I was caught out ! If you don't have the CD they'll sell you a replacement :-( Along with others I posted my distaste at this policy on their UK support forum - but my post was deleted as were other peoples - seems Hauppauge doesn't want to listen or comment to their customers who pay their wages. This is a shame as I had recently been very impressed by their warranty service when one of my HVR-1600's started to fail. Any suggestions as to alternate vendors who don't have such a retarded policy re drivers and apps ?
Hauppauge support, drivers, and software all suck...and that is from someone who uses one of their cards, and has used their stuff for years. My 1600 will not work with WinTV7, yet they have stopped distributing WinTV6 for my card! I had to search arround their website's archives to get a copy of WinTV6 that was part of the driver package for another card. If you need a copy of WinTV6 or WinTV7, PM me...I have lots of different versions, including one version of WinTV6 that allows you to dissable the onboard encoders, so that you can watch truly "live" TV and it is even so fast that you can play video games with it. Avermedia is not so draconian in their software/drivers/support, but the hardware sucks. Kworld makes some of the worst hardware in the industry...many users get 4-5 bad devices in a row before they finaly give up on this awfull company. However, they have better driver support than Hauppappaugggue. Pinnacle seems to have decent support and decent hardware...but they also have high prices and few features. Asus is hit and miss...their quality is poor, but it is usualy good enough to make a PCI or PCIe card just fine. The accessories that come with their cards usualy don't work well...if they work at all. Also, their support is perhapse the most annoying on earth...requiring you to install a special download manager to get drivers from the same crummy Akami servers that microsoft uses for Windows Update. Canopus is very nice, but also very expensive. They make one of the best professional MPEG2 encoders ever made, and their support is good. You might have trouble finding the features you want in a card you can afford. EVGA has high quality, but I think they only make external tuners. Visontek is so bad that they make Kworld look good.
