The problem is it is not readily apparent from the Hauppauge site that this card is a hybrid, and not a dual combo card (i.e. two HVR-1800 cards on one PCIe 1x).  Only recently did I even see them mention that 'You can record one show while watching another'.  Infact the way the page reads it leads you to believe that the card has two NTSC tuners and two QAM tuners.

I bought the card expecting a dual combo card.  I'm not terribly put out since I have two PVR-150's that I'll just salvage for now. 

While I do find the card to be a good design, I do feel Hauppauge is dangerously close to the line of false advertising.  Hopefully a future version of VMC or 7MC will have full support for Hybrid cards and not make us choose between NTSC and QAM.

Kaplah:

Hopefully a future version of VMC or 7MC will have full support for Hybrid cards and not make us choose between NTSC and QAM.

you'll get your wish :-) 

as confirmed a few posts back, the card is supported in hybrid mode in Windows 7.

Well, I figured out part of my problem with not getting the channels, but just as quickly appear to be confused again. I had been using the Oct 14 drivers on my card and by setting both tuners to GCI Digital I was only getting a few channels, and a few extra if I set one of them to an analog tuner. But the other night, I downloaded the most recent beta drivers off the FTP site and scanned again, this time setting one as a ClearQAM to the normal GCI digital cable, and the other to the Cable ATSC GCI. When I did, the channel scan still didn't find a single channel aftewards, but when I went into edit channels for the guide, suddenly many of my channels that showed a lock beside them prior now didn't and I was able to find many, many more shows. I went from about 15-20 channels to 70+ channels to include G4, History and several HD channels I don't even get right now with my GCI Ultimate package unless I upgrade. I was able to record one show that night while i slept just to test, but the next evening when I went to goof around some more with it and start editing the guide so that it actually saw what each channels were (G4 instead of just 8.5) the signal was gone? Now I've tried to scan again and several of the channels I had prior are now gone. When I tried to start over and reconfigure the tuners, then scan again, it almost always locks up at 78%. If I close VMC and restart it and goto editing the guide, some of the channels now show a lock beside them again? I'm quite lost now and wonder if anyones got any ideas. At the moment, I have rolled back to the old drivers and am waiting on the scan to finish which is going really slow. 67% with 0 channels still.

Yep..hit 78% complete and froze once again. ...blah!

Cup:

mmatheny:

Just saw the problem, running Windows Ultimate, and it says VMC only supports 2 (TWO) tuners! What the heck is going on here??

Windows Vista Ultimate
Service Pack 1

VMC Version 6.1.1000.18273
TV Tuner Setup

"You can use 2 tuners of each type (NTSC and ATSC) with Windows Media Center, enabling you to record two TV shows at the same time"

Fixed.  :)
Stop trying to get the tuner to run in what you call "hybrid mode", which it doesn't have.
You need to pick what mode you want each of the two tuners to run in.  You cannot switch modes on-the-fly.

HTH,

 

AHHHHH, but in W7MC I CAN!!!! Yeaaaah!

Okay, I've been having issues with analog tuning with two of this card and the TV Pack.

I want two tuners (aka one card) to be set as analog, and two set as ClearQAM (the other card).  When I try to do this however, QAM works flawlessly, and only one of the analog tuners works.  So, I tried to set up all four as analog, just to see if I could get that working, and only two of the tuners work properly when set up that way.

I didn't explicitly install any beta drivers or anything, maybe that will help?

Edit:  081117_22xx_7.5.6.26322.prerelease fixed my issues.  I get two ClearQAM and two analog working perfectly all at the same time using two cards.  The only issue I had was that the ClearQAM channel names were different from the expected names in the guide, so I had to manually add the listings to each channel.  Not that big of a deal really, and it might be a change on Comcast's end and not the drivers.

I recently bought this card to go along with a new computer I built around a Core i7 processor. I have both Vista Ultimate + TV Pack and XP MCE installed and am using Vista MCE (main program) as well as many other programs including GB-PVR (XP), SageTV (XP), and BeyondTV (XP). When I record/watch one program of either analog or QAM it looks incredible and actually seems better than my TVs tuner. When I try to use two streams at once (QAM + QAM, QAM + NTSC, or NTSC + NTSC) for either dual recording or recording and watching the videos get messed up. Any digital stream will lose the majority of the data and any analog stream will suffer from stuttering and pauses every couple seconds to a minute. It works fine with one stream and even watching while recoding a single stream but as soon as a second video stream is requested the quality vanishes regardless of the OS or program. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the hardware since I have verified that both NTSC and QAM are able to record solo perfectly on both tuners. Any one have an idea of something to try? Any help would be great.

I know this is going to sound nuts, but this is what I did to fix the problem on my PVR-500 back "in the day"

If you have an nvidia graphics card... open the Nvidia control panel, go down to VIDEO & TELEVISION (under the Select a Task in the advanced view) and then adjust video image settings...

Under Edge enhancement, click us the NVIDIA setting... change it to anything 1% or greater...
Under Noise Reduction, do the same. 

Fixed my studdering problem... 

Tim

can anyone tell answer me a few questions about this card:

1- does anyone have this card running in Vista x64 SP1
2- is anyone running it with more than 4GB ram (i will be using 6GB to start with)
3- does the card record 2 atsc channels at the same time with the single tuner on the back
4- if yes to all the above, what drivers are you using and are you running the TV pack or not

I have seen various posts some confirm my questions and some say there are issues, if anyone knows for sure i would appreciate it

featherking:

can anyone tell answer me a few questions about this card:

1- does anyone have this card running in Vista x64 SP1
2- is anyone running it with more than 4GB ram (i will be using 6GB to start with)
3- does the card record 2 atsc channels at the same time with the single tuner on the back
4- if yes to all the above, what drivers are you using and are you running the TV pack or not

I have seen various posts some confirm my questions and some say there are issues, if anyone knows for sure i would appreciate it

1- I'm not but I'll try to answer!
2- The November pre-release drivers support this, supposedly
3- it should, if you have it configured for 2 atsc tuners
4- yes i run tv pack and run the oct prerelease drivers (I dont need more than 4gb of RAM)

I brought the computer home from college and plugged it into our local Hometown Utilicom and everything works fine for dual tuning. So apparently the problem is related to the Comcast we get at school.

featherking:

can anyone tell answer me a few questions about this card:

1- does anyone have this card running in Vista x64 SP1
2- is anyone running it with more than 4GB ram (i will be using 6GB to start with)
3- does the card record 2 atsc channels at the same time with the single tuner on the back
4- if yes to all the above, what drivers are you using and are you running the TV pack or not

I have seen various posts some confirm my questions and some say there are issues, if anyone knows for sure i would appreciate it

1.  Yes (with the TVPack).
2.  Yes (8GB of RAM)
3.  I'm not doing ATSC, but I've got two of these card installed, with one cable wire going into each of them.  The one card does analog, and the other does ClearQAM absolutely fine, and since I installed the newest drivers, I can record on all four tuners at once.  I'd imagine that ATSC would work just as well.
4.  Yes to the TVPack, running drivers 081117_22xx_7.5.6.26322.prerelease now and works great.

I talked to a Hauppauge technician, and he said they are having trouble with Comcast (he specifically mentioned Texas). Not sure what the issue is, but seems Comcast it creating it (either intentionally or unintentionally!)

Where do you find these Hauppauge beta / prerelease driver downloads? Tried searching Hauppauge.com. ???

ftp://hauppauge.com/support/beta/wiltshire ... it has been metioned a few times in this thread. Has anyone noticed that the 4.8 CD Drivers were posted on the site on 12/24/2008? ftp://hauppauge.com/support/beta/ Has anyone tried them?

Actually, I believe those are the wrong drivers for the US 2250 - I believe those are for DVB tuners. Here is the correct site to get the pre-release drivers:

ftp://hauppauge.com/Support/HVR2250

Beware, the latest (081219_22xx_7.5.6.26354.PreRelease.zip) driver package, I cannot get any signal on the digital side, only analog. Others report same issue here:

http://www.shspvr.com/smf/index.php?topic=11862.0