Today's lifestyles are very different to those of only a decade ago, almost everything is 24hrs I'm sure you can think of exactly where you can get petrol, food and even browse for electrical products 24hrs a day and so television viewing habits have changed and our favourites programmes are no longer on when we are home. This has set the stage for devices such as Sky+ and the leaders in PC based PVR's (personal video recorders) Hauppauge.

The Hauppauge WinTV product range offers the ability to slide in a PCI card and make the most of your PC's hard drive and processing power and a colleague of Lordpercy who has been using WinTV for many years gave us a test drive of the latest WinTV PVR USB box which saves you fighting to fit cards and simply plugs up to a USB 2.0 or 1.1 port.

First things first its important to make sure you PC is "keved up" or highly specified to you and me, the Hauppauge WinTV USB suite uses a lot of your host machines power so if you intend to be doing other things as well as watching / recording television then you'll be wanting a 2gzh P4 machine with 512mb of RAM and a healthy sized hard disk. In fact from our play with the WinTV USB suite it would be best to use it in the most powerful machine you can afford, the trade off if its installed in a low spec machine is either jerky pictures and sound or the inability to do anything else on the machine.

Its a huge advantage to have a USB 2.0 port to make the best use of the Hauppauge WinTV USB, this allows the full 12mbits of video to be streamed to your PC's hard drive not the limited 6mbits of USB 1.1 but even that is sufficient for most users needs. A word of warning the unit tends to run quite hot, LP realised this when he lent on it! so best to keep it in a ventilated area not under a desk gathering fluff.

But enough of the pre requisites and onto the function, the unit has connectors for TV and cable and the integrated tuner can store up to 125 channels there also connection for composite and S video for VCR's and other devices to connect to the Hauppauge. The MEG encoder can work with both MPEG 1/2 compressing the recorded video and audio to fit an hour into 1Gb of hard disk but if you run at DVD rates it will eat your disk much quicker, the Hardware MPEG decoder allows you to watch TV on your laptop or PC screen and replay pre recorded files.

Recordings can be made in a number of ways, firstly a simple push to record or perhaps a timed recording using the WinTV scheduler software and there is the killer feature of any PVR the ability to pause the live TV in effect starting the recording for you to pick up where you left off. You can then burn TV shows to VCD or DVD using your PC's DVD/CD RW. Now some Features are a little lacking it would be useful for the Hauppauge WinTV USB to support multiple tuners so you could watch one channel while recording another and the picture mosaic function where 15 channels are displayed at the same time is a real let down with the updated of each tile being so slow its like watching a  security camera.

However the quality of the full screen recorded MPEG's are good, good enough to watch on our friends 32" widescreen monitor without irritating pixilation, running at about compression that results in files of 6gb for an hour of encoded video gave excellent results when replayed and even when subsequently burnt to DVD (which gave us the option to snip out the adverts too). Our friend uses the Hauppauge WinTV USB for all of his viewing and has ditched his cable decoder in favour of the little black unit the primary benefit is being able to surf the web while having the TV in a quarter of the screen and he is making full use of the scheduler to record TV while he's down the pub, although it has been a little temperamental but of course being a PC you can download and use 3rd party software (like the sage recorder) and online TV listings.

Overall the Hauppauge WinTV USB offers a good compromise for those who don't want to fit the PCI card version (WinTV 350) you do need to have USB 2.0 and a fairly meaty machine but it does allow you to create a truly multimedia PC experience which if you spend most of your time surfing and watching TV makes this WinTV USB the right choice for you.

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