Suhit Gupta
07-31-2004, 05:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review1766_main8838.html' target='_blank'>http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review1766_main8838.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"The WinTV-PVR-250 is a PCI-slot TV tuner and video capture card that allows you to watch, record and pause live TV in a window or full screen. . The “PVR” in the model number stands for Personal Video Recorder, which like TiVo or ReplayTV, allows you to watch, record and pause live TV. It features a 125-channel tuner and is a bit different – and better – than most other TV tuners in that it features onboard hardware MPEG-2 compression. MPEG-2 is the video format natively used by DVDs and many multimedia programs and devices, making it ideal for a PC-based TV Tuner."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/20040723_0755591.gif" /><br /><br />This is a nice lengthy review of the WinTV-PVR-250 which concludes that it is a good product for HTPC enthusiasts and Windows Media Center system builders. There certainly are cheaper solutions available (this sells for under $140), but the PVR-250 has quite an advantage over them with its hardware based MPEG encoder. One of the downsides of having this card is the poor software bundled with it, but that is quickly overshadowed if you combine this with a PVR front-end such as Snapstream’s BeyondTV3.