Hauppauge 1212 HD-PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder

I was most pleased with this converter, it performed faultlessly for nearly three years, until I made a mistake : I plugged in a 12 v.power supply and blew the fuse: more than the fuse, probably said the tech I spoke to in New-York, so I bought another one, recently. I am convinced that the state of the art could have made it possible to install a fool (that's me) proof reset-able fuse that would have positively protected this unit. I am not the only fool to have grabbed the wrong cable : " from the experience we have..." said the man in Haupage NY". This unit is not properly protected when used by fumblers, because it would have cost just a little more, and because turn-over is good business.

as expected,great value,top class

First one was DOA, but Amazon fixed me right up.The IR blaster would not stick at all to my cable box and had a crack in it(so did not want to push too hard), but Hauppauge sent me a replacement(never had a problem with them).Works with Media Center with the latest drivers/utility on the Hauppauge site. You HAVE to use the included blaster for Media Center because media center will see the HDPVR as a tuner not a capture device. This does result is slow channel changes(even more so when jumping from SD to HD or HD to SD), but that is not a problem for me.Setup is easy and the recording seems to work well. This device does not come with a remote, but I had my old media center remote and ir receiver. I also have an older Hauppauge remote, but did not get around to testing it.Please note that using this under Media Center you should not power cycle the unit or it will fail to work in Media Center until you reboot. You can however just restart the Hauppauge Media Center Service instead.

This device is good for archiving HD broadcast content to a computer.Many cable set-top boxes offer a built-in DVR nicely integrated with the rest of the cable box functionality. They're very convenient. Trying to replace that functionality with this box might be rather challenging and less convenient. I haven't tried that. Problem with set-top DVRs is the content is usually on some internal disk in a proprietary format. You can't share it or view it on a computer. You can't archive it. If you want to change cable providers or the box has a hardware failure you loose all your recordings.If your set-top cable box has Component Video and audio outputs (some boxes send output to both Component Video and HDMI outputs simultaneously) you can plug the Component Video outputs into this Hauppauge and capture the video into a (large) file on your computer. (Capturing video output from an HDMI output port on your cable box is not supported because its not legal.) The Hauppauge connects to your computer via a USB port. One can certainly set up a video capture manually (to capture live broadcasts or playback of DVR recorded shows). I haven't tried it to set up any automatic/periodic capturing - you would at least need a dedicated computer attached to the Hauppauge.Selecting the highest variable input bit rate, 13M bits/second, will give you quality that rivals the original broadcast. With variable bit rate, the 13Mb/s setting is the maximum data rate used. If the actual video is not busy it will use up less to capture. The higher the data rate, the better the final quality, but also the bigger the captured file will be. Actually, some HD broadcasts appear to be compressed to a lower bit rate than 13Mb/s given their poor quality. You can't make quality better than the original. Note also that playback quality is dependent on how powerful your playback equipment is. The file stored on your computer may contain a very high quality recording but if your computer graphics hardware is mediocre, you won't see quality output.The video capture software that comes with the product is a bit clunky but works, at least under Windows 7. The captured file format is H.264 which is supported by Windows 7 and other video players.

I have been using this product for three years now and I have to say I love it. The only pain in the butt is the driver installation, if you follow the instructions you shouldn't have a problem. This PVR records up to 720P. Pretty much any computer should be able to handle this (I'm using a 2.3ghz single core with 3GB or RAM)and it runs flawlessly. I would recommend that if you buy this product, if you have the recording software open, close it before shutting off your PVR (freezes the computer). The PVR has great picture quality and you really don't need anything more. Now a days there are cheaper PVR's that have component and HDMI inputs and outputs. This is a great product for what it is, there are better ones now a days but this is still one of the best ones out there.

I was sick and tired of losing my PVR’ed shows off of my encrypted PVR supplied by my TV provider. The hardware crapped out, had to be replaced, all my recording gone. Provider insisted on upgrading my equipment, all my recordings gone.So I went looking for a solution. After a number of products that did not work or was so poor quality it was not worth the trouble.I got this unit in just a few days. I had it hooked up and running in an hour.I now have over 20 hours of programing archived in HD broadcast quality. Love it.The hardware does what it is supposed to do and the software is very easy to use.I’m running it on an older 2.5 MHz Vista computer.I had a few issues with installing and freezing at first, but that is a Vista problem (problems are the norm with Vista. The calculator will crash it).I understand there are a few problems with window’s 7 but there is a ton of help on-line for that and ArcSoft has lots of documentation and easy fixes on its site.I don’t know what the other posters problems are with this product but on the other hand I have no idea why you would want a recording of yourself playing a video game from 3 weeks ago. Kinda like hiring a film crew to shoot you playing a game of checkers with your sister!!However I can see this product being great for that as well.

I am extremely pleased with the performance and quality of this HD Video Capture device. Notice I did not refer to this as an HD "PVR" because I am not using it for time-shifting/timer recording purposes.I bought this little gem to capture HD video that I'd previously recorded to my internal & external hard drives on Dish Network vip622 satellite PVR/receiver. I'm using the 1212 to "back up" my recordings so that I don't loose my collection should I choose to end my Dish Network service at some point. The recordings I've done so far have all resulted in excellent quality and I cannot detect any degradation in video or audio quality from the original Dish recordings. If you are looking for a device to record HD Satellite ... I highly recommend this HD PVR. For use as a PVR to record live shows or to use as a timer based recorder, I defer to others who have used the device in this manner. Although I am extremely pleased with this device, there are two "cons", 1) the device only comes with a quick start manual, for any other info/help, you are on your own, 2) the price of the device seems very high (probably because there are few competitive devices available). At this price I expected a clear and complete manual for successful operation instead of just a guide to "quick setup".My HT/PC/AV/Network set up:- 1212 input is Component video in & toslink (optical) audio in directly from my Dish Network vip622 receiver.- I am not using the "pass thru" component out or toslink (optical) out (I'm using splitters to route both video and audio directly to the 1212 and my Sony AV receiver.- 1212 is attached via USB to an MSI Wind Netbook (so definitely the 1212 can be connected to a low end PC) Note: I'm only using the 1212 as a capture device and I move all output to my other high end PCs for any editing, the video files are also moved to my NAS for playback using a Mediagate MG800HD network connected media player that is part of my HT setup.A few things that I've found to be true of the device as I'm using it:1. my first attempt at recording was a complete failure because I set the bit rate to max (13.5) variable and tried to record to .mp4 format. The resulting file was filled with artifacts and the audio was only 2 channel stereo. About 5 minutes into the recording, the audio suddenly got out of sync with the video ... bottom line, I deleted the file and tried again.2. my next several recording all turned out to be perfect, the video was a crisp as the original, and I was able to preserve the 5.1 audio in the original recording. To achieve this I set the recording format to .ts (instead of .mp4), set the bit rate back to the defaults (9.0 constant), turned off "Hardware Acceleration" and "View While Recording". The first two changes effected the settings inside the 1212, the latter two changes I did because I was using a Netbook as my "connected" PC that didn't have enough juice to handle the overhead. Caution: if you use .mp4 or .m2ts formats you will loose the 5.1 audio. Also be aware that recording in any HD format at 1920x1080 like I am doing will require a lot of storage space. Currently I have 5 PCs and a NAS so my network has about 13 terabytes of storage available.3. All my recordings have been manual and at first I was bothered by the seeming lag when I first started the recordings (clicking capture) but after checking the beginning of the recordings, they actually started the moment I hit "capture". It seems that only "pass thru" and/or the view on a PC shows this momentary lag, it is luckily not part of the recordings themselves. Since I'm not using "pass thru" connections, this is not a problem for me. Once you click "Stop" the file is on your hard drive.3. I've been very successful at editing the .ts files with a free tool called "Smart Cutter Portable". Using this program I am able to cut out commercials and such while preserving the high quality video and 5.1 audio. the tool does not re-encode the entire .ts file, it only needs to re-encode the start and end frames. Very slick, and recommended as a nice add on for the 1212. Again, I cannot comment on the Arcsoft software that is included because I haven't used it ... I will say though that there are much better (aka more user friendly and feature rich) "free" and "pay" tools available.I could write a book about this great device, but I won't ... let's just say that if, like me, you are looking for a device that can record from HD satellite sources this is it.