Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600

WinTV-HVR-1600, model 1178, product code 74021

WinTV-HVR-1600MCE, model 1101, product code 74551

An ATSC PCI card from Hauppauge.

It is supported under Linux.

Overview/Features

There are (at least) two slightly different revisions of this dual tuner card.

Model 1178 - features 2 RF inputs (analog, digital) and has product codes (found on the tuner label):

• 74021

Model 1101- features 3 RF inputs (analog, digital, radio) and has product codes (found on the tuner label):

• 74551

Under Windows, product codes

• 74021 & 74041 support QAM
• 74031 and 74551 do not support QAM

There are a couple of other models mentioned near the bottom of Hauppauge's product page, but it appears their description may suffer from some copy and paste errors. To say the least, the company provided information is far from clear.

Components Used

This card features:

• a Maxlinear tuner and the Microtune MT2131 tuner
• Samsung S5H1409/Conexant CX24227 digital demodulator
• Cirrus Logic CS.... (audio ADC)
• Conexant CX23418 A/V Decoder, MPEG-2 Encoder & PCI bridge
• ESMT

Making it work

Firmware

The firmware can be obtained from [here]. It is required only for the analog (V4L) functionality of the device.

Drivers

Status Report
As of August, 2008, NTSC support is excellent on pci 2.3 compliant hardware. Given the on-board mpeg encoder, it is very light on resources when recording. There are some issues for _some_ users on older hardware. Closed captioning is not yet supported.

As of August, 2008, HDTV is well supported and quite stable on modern hardware that is pci 2.3 compliant. There are some issues for _some_ users on older hardware. Closed captioning is not yet supported. OTA HDTV is known to work very well.

General Tips
As a general rule, HDTV is very resource intensive. The HVR-1600 is no exception. A video card supporting OpenGL and/or XvMC is strongly recommended. Minimum CPU feature set should probably start at a dual-core or a very late model single-core.

The Myth TV in the repositories at debian-multimedia.org support the card with no issues.

External Links

• Hauppauge product page
• gentoo wiki article on the HVR-1600 ... An informative summary to get started, albeit a little old
• Myth TV's information on the HVR-1600