Hauppauge HVR-1800

Haupauge HVR-1800 TV Tuner Card

The notion of a personal Home Theater PC (HTPC) is becoming more prevalent lately. Many ideas can go into the planning of an HTPC. Will it be able to stream video across the network? Will it act as a central media hub? Will it be able to view online videos? The most important question being, will it be able to record and playback TV? This is where Hauppauge shines. Hauppauge has been producing quality TV tuner cards for quite some time now. In the Linux community, their cards are near synonymous with MythTV. So does their latest addition, the WinTV-HVR-1800, have the goods to make it into your next HTPC build? Read on, and we’ll tell you. The HVR-1800 is a TV tuner card. This means that is will allow you to watch and capture TV shows right to your computer. MythTV support for the card seems to work, but may require some extra configuration and an updated kernel. In our testing we found the included WinTV software to be a bit lackluster in the feature department. You will have a lot more luck if you use the built in Windows Media Center that comes with either Vista or Windows 7.