Before I talk about my experience with this device let me give you a brief background on what I intended to use it for and how i stumbled upon the product. As some of you may know, capture devices have multiple purposes(Record live tv, Transfer old videos to your pc, stream video’s etc…). The reason why i wanted to purchase a capture device was because I wanted to broadcast/stream video content from my TV. After spending a few hours researching this topic I knew i had to get some sort of capture device to be able to go from Cable box –> Computer –> Internet.

There are many types of capture cards out there that vary in form and price. I hate to go real cheap on a product because you know what they say “you get what you pay for”. The Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1950 was a product that stood out to me because of it’s reviews online and recommendations from streaming sites. I needed an external device because I was planning on using it with my laptop (Lenovo Y550P ) which is also a great alternative to a macbook pro .

The box included 2 install discs, One for the drivers and utility software, and the other for Ulead DVD movie factory. Installation was pretty simple and straight forward. Followed the quick installation instructions and i was up and running in no time. Here’s are the Pro’s and Con’s

Pro’s:

• Pretty straight forward installation.

• Great Video Quality

• Easy to use remote

• External MPEG-2 encoder (doesn’t take too much resources from computer so you can run other programs without affecting quality of video)

• Easily integrates with Windows Media Center

Con’s:

• Ulead DVD software it came with didn’t recognize the device when i tried to import video

• Not much documentation. It would be nice to have a more detailed manual instead of just a quick install guide

In summary I think this is a great product. Great picture quality and easy integration with windows 7. After messing around with it I was able to stream content like how i wanted.