"Hauppauge WinTV-HDR-1600 - User Review"

By Ron Stultz

17 December 2009

Summary: works as advertised.

Hauppauge WinTV-HDR-1600 (1600):

- Bought new.

- Do not use driver CD, download new driver and WinTV7 from Hauppauge website.

- Analog cable connection. Have not tried with digital set top box or digital cable.

- Beside TV, wanted to convert VHS tapes to digital using 1600. Had to specifically enable composite input in configuration software! Then, could not find how to switch from TV to composite. With WINTV7 on monitor, right mouse click in the TV viewing area and on drop down menu, click on "Find Channel". Scroll to the end of the channel list and you will find "Composite" listed there. Of course nothing in manual or even "Help" that I could find about composite.

- After making a VHS tape recording, found it to be in format not suitable for me to edit. Have to specifically tell 1600 to convert recording to mpeg when recording finished.

- Fed VCR left and right audio output into line-in of 1600 but some sort of impedance mismatch as distorted sound during composite recording. Have never experienced this distortion other times I directly fed VCR audio into a computer audio line-in.

- Disconnected VCR from 1600 line-in and connected analog cable to VCR input and VCR output to 1600. Now when VCR playing back tapes, fed to 1600 as part of analog input. 1600 sound recording of VHS tapes is fine using this method.

- Happy to report that 1600 does not hang or freeze my WinTel system as did some cheaper TV cards did.

- WinTV7 is not as robust or full featured as I would like. For example, if I want to convert a VHS tape and not have to sit and watch it to know when to stop recording, I have to create a schedule TV entry! And no reason, I should have to always right mouse click on TV screen to change a channel.

- Hardware seems better than software but does work.