Customer reviews for the Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 Dual digital DVB-T PCI TV card

Per most reviews, generally 'ok'.
Minus points:
- software fairly poor.
- won't pick up ITV channels from Sutton Coldfield tx (not a signal strgeth issue, my other tuners have no issue, try google hauppauge itv sutton coldfield)
- EPG is an local webservere, not via remote.

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I think Stuart Ward must have the card models confused. This card is based on the Dibcom chips rather than connextant ones, (and always has been, AFAIK). The main driver module for this card is dvb-usb-dib0700, for which TV viewing seems to work okay for me, although other people have reported kernel oops's and lockups as recently as late June 2007 (http://www.mail-archive.com/vdr%40linuxtv.org/msg03080.html). The other problem is that the infra red remote sensor doesn't work: there's still no Linux support for it. It also looks like if support every does appear, it will be in the same keyboard-event-generating style as the other v4l IR devices have been recently; which is fine, but means you can only use the sensor with the remote that came out of the box, which a bit limiting when the hardware is capable of supporting most remote controls if the driver would only pass the data to LIRC. Apart for this, it seems to do the job reasonably, but it's not wonderful.

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I purchased this card due to the great write ups it has been getting, but in my case it has been a big disappointment. The idea was to throw away my set top box, and have the pc under the tv using the media center side of Vista. I've now admitted defeat and ordered Sky+. It is very fussy over signal strength-my old set top box would find 70 channels, and the picture would hardly ever break up. This card found 46 channels and the picture quality was terrible.

The big problem is signal strength, and this cards lack of ability to deal with less than perfect signal quality. I've no doubt changing the aerial and coax would solve the problem, but its not an option where I live. Would also be costly. So it's Sky+ for me, but at least the PC under the Tv is great for watching HD material, and my collection of Divx films, without having to burn them to disc.

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Running Hauppauge's own WinTV application and scanning for freeview Channels the application, IR receiver etc all works a treat.
A different story under MCE Vista - I live 3 miles from the transmitter, all other Freeview boxes and applications are fine. MCE recognises both tuners, yet takes an hour to scan and misses ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, plus over half the other DVB channels. I put this down to a Hauppauge or Windows MCE driver or application fault and await new drivers. I would not recommend this for use under MCE Vista to date due to this issue.

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DO NOT buy this product for use with Linux. In the past few weeks, Hauppauge has changed the specification without notice and without changing the model number, and the new model does not have Linux drivers.

Internally the incompatible model is labelled WinTV-NOVA-TD-500. The extra D stands for diversity, a new feature that allows weak signals to be boosted by using two antennae. The extra antenna socket is the quickest way of visually identifying which of these cards are useless junk.

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• Ease of use
• Value for money