Hauppauge DVB cards

[dooferlad]

Has anyone got any experience with Hauppauge DVB cards, specifically the Nova-T 500? Considering the price, the Nova-T 500 seems to be just what I am looking for. Any feedback on the quality of the BDA drivers / compatibility with Sage for it or other Hauppauge products would be great.

[peterjb]

Originally Posted by dooferlad

Has anyone got any experience with Hauppauge DVB cards, specifically the Nova-T 500? Considering the price, the Nova-T 500 seems to be just what I am looking for. Any feedback on the quality of the BDA drivers / compatibility with Sage for it or other Hauppauge products would be great.

I don't have an answer to your query as I was also looking at one of these to replace my twin Hauppauge/Technotrend NOVA-T cards ( No problems or issues with them, I'd just like to free up a PCI slot in my current rig). However if the drivers implement the BDA architecture properly, then it should work like a bought one.

There were a number of quality& driver problems with these cards ( check the following URLs http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/comm...river-bug.html, http://www.xpmediacentre.com.au/comm...500-tuner.html & http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=374080 ) as well as the tuners being picky about the quality of antenna feed. Others questioned the quality/reliability of the VIA USB to PCI bridge used to support the dual tuners.

With so much less than positive press about a new product, I didn't end up getting one. With the subsequent price drops since it's release I would be interested to know if anything has changed as I'd still be keen on getting one.

Cheers

Peter

[dooferlad]

Thanks for the information - it does look like a complete dud!

*sigh*

Will I ever get DVB working with this darn machine? Anyone used a duel tuner PCI card (not PCI-e) that Sage is happy with with good signal sensitivity?

[pjwerdna]

Just stuck one of these in my test machine with SageTV 6 beta.

Seems to work fine for me. Setup was a bit of a guess and needed a few reboots to get everything to be recognised, but the driver installed by default seems to be the BDA version and picking "no guide for this tuner" option seems to have triggered the use of the guide built into the DVB-T signal.

I've only got two issues, which may be beta related.
1. Every channel shows up twice.
2. my 1GHz epia is barely capable of playing DVB-T (it used to be ok before I had to rebuild it)