Instead of buying a second Tivo...

[Timothy Huber]

I picked up a Hauppauge WinTV PVR USB2 yesterday, and am running it with SnapStream BeyondTV as PVR software. Seems to work pretty well.

I had to give up my dual-tuner DirecTivo when we moved last year -- our new home doesn't have a clear view of Southern sky (at least where the homeowner's association would allow us to install a dish). We've been limping along with a single-drive Tivo running off our digital cable box.

Although the home networking capabilities of the stand alone Tivos has somewhat made up for it, the poorer picture quality/performance of digital cable and the "don't change the channel while Tivo is recording" has been a nasty dose of reality.

In fact, last week my wife said (oh, that I had Tivo for conversations) "we've got to make sure our next house is DirecTV capable."

So in advance of the simultaneous premieres of "Smallville" and "Lost" I decided to give a PC-based PVR solution a try. We'll see how things go. As I don't have the PC hooked up to our TV, I'm anticipating doing some DVD burning to watch the shows recorded on the PC.

Can anyone else comment on PC-based PVR's?

Timothy

[The Yaz]

I have the older usb model. I've enjoyed using it because it will gives you the pvr capabilities as well as editing out the commercials and saving the files as mpeg1/vcd or mpeg2.

My only advice is to make sure all of the software is intsalled and running about an hour before you want to really record. I found my model was very finicky when I first installed it. Happauge's site offers plenty of updated drivers and other software, but even then you might have to try the drivers of older MS OS's (my XP machine only worked properly when I installed the drivers for ME/W98SE).

Once the computer recognizes the device, let the software find all of the channels on the tv tuner. Record a 15 minute snippet as a test. If it plays back fine, reboot your system one last time and you should be ready for tonight.

Good luck,

Steve 8)