wintv go

Hauppauge's low budget move in the TV digitalization arena. The card retails for $49.99, and can be found at most computer stores. What you get for this price is a PCI card with a COAX in, and a RCA in. It only supports MONO audio, and can not handle full screen display.

For the price, the Hauppauge WinTV Go is an excellent product for TV viewing on your computer. The installation was simple, and most operating systems are supported via drivers on the CD.

The TV viewer itself sucks. It takes eons to load in Windows 2000, (what doesnt though?) while consuming 100% CPU usage (thank god its not multithreaded). It has a poor display quality when you make the display larger than 200x150, and it's recoding abilities leave something to be desired (it drops massive frames even on my SMP P3-550). If you want to watch TV, go get one. If you want to record, or use this for playing videos etc...you should go for something different.

Associated URLS: www.hauppauge.com

Actually, those in the know can fix that problem. The problem is that the Hauppauge cards (by default) write their data to the primary plane of your video card. This has to be done through the CPU and uses a *ton* of resources. What you want is to have it render on the overlay plane (PCI push).

You can do this by going to the "Primary" program, and changing it from "Force Primary" to "Allow Overlay". Voila! 1% CPU usage, and faster startup time to boot!