Hauppauge WinTV PCI

The Hauppauge WinTV PCI board provides television and radio input to a standard PC. This basic model provides PAL, NTSC and SECAM decoding with only mono sound. Other boards provide NICAM stereo as well.

Windows Support
The machine came pre-configured with Windows 98 Second Edition with the WinTV driver already installed. This provided very good results.

After up- (or should that be down-) -grading to Windows XP it took several months to obtain a working driver. The supposed XP driver from Hauppages website fails to install with a "The data is invalid" error. Hauppauges Technical support people have been less than helpful in addressing the problem. I eventually found an item in their FAQ some months afterwards which addresses the problem - you need to change some of the permissions in the registry before installing the drivers - after which WinTV2000 works perfectly!.

Linux Support
Things are much more rosy on the Linux front. The WinTV board uses the standard bttv driver and xawtv works very well. xawtv is a rather limited application and I would recommend using KWinTV, except that it took some effort to get the alpha working - in the end I had to create symlinks all over the place so that it could load its config files and had to for HAVE_XVLIB in config.h to get Xv plugin to work. I cannot wait for a full release, as it promises to be very good.