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 since kernel 2.6.26.

Overview/Features

There are (at least) three different revisions of this dual tuner card with two layouts.

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

• 74021

Models 1101 and 1183 - feature 3 RF inputs (analog, digital, radio) and have product codes (found on the tuner label):

• 74551 (Model 1101)
• 74541 (Model 1183)

Under Windows, product codes

• 74021 & 74041 support QAM
• 74031 and 74551 do not support QAM
• 74541 claims to support QAM but has not been tested

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:

• Maxlinear MXL5005S tuner and 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.

As of June, 2009, a known issue with the mxl5005s tuner driver still causes (at least) QAM programs to be received with a SNR loss of up to 3 dB, when compared with the Windows driver. For a weaker input signal, this can ultimately lead to errors in the received transport stream.

On Oct 29, 2009, a call for testers went out on the linux-media and ivtv-devel mailing list for a patch that addresses the above mentioned tuning problem: KernelLabs blog entry calling for testers

As of Feb. 6, 2011. Card is functional with Ubuntu 64bit and Mythtv. You still must install the updated proprietary drivers however.

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.

MythTV in the repositories at debian-multimedia.org supports 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