benchodroff.com

I have spent the better part of this last month wrestling with technical support and a slew of forums trying to get my Hauppauge PVR-500MCE tv tuner to work in Windows Media Center 2005.

At first, the card that I purchased from NewEgg had experienced poor reception quality in the lower chanels (mostly 2-8). I noticed this problem while running the card using MythTV (using ivtv 0.7 and knoppmyth). I assumed this must be a problem with ivtv’s support for the card under linux, and decided to see what I was missing by switching over to Windows MCE 2005. The card was designed for the Windows operating system, so how hard could it be to install it?

Very, very, very hard.

First of all, hauppauge’s support page is very confusing. It provides you with a download for some zip file which contains all the drivers for Media Center - but then they have a whole slew of other drivers and beta drivers and….which one is the correct one? Who knows?!

To make a very long story short, I ended up getting the card to work in Windows XP, but not in Windows Media Center. I was able to run the TV in WinTV 2000 and the lower number channels were *still* very fuzzy and would sometimes even go into black and white. Horrible. In Windows Media Center, I was unable to event tune into the channels.

I had Hauppauge replace the card. They commented, “This card [the PVR-500MCE] would be great if it ever worked.” Apparently, I am not the only one who has experienced problems with this card. Simply google the card and be amazed at how many people have problems with it.

After two weeks, I received my brand spanking new Hauppauge PVR-500MCE card in the mail. I popped in the card and got it to work in WinTV2005, but Media Center reported:

“the tuner hardware is either malfunctioning or not installed. please ensure that both the tuner hardware and a valid tuner hardware driver are installed.”

I played it safe - I reinstalled Windows XP Media Center 2005, including rollup2. Still, the same problem. I took out all the PCI cards from the computer except the card, and changed the cards position. Still, the same error.

Now, this is clearly a Windows XP Media Center problem - because the card works beautifully in WinTV 2000. However, I blame both Hauppauge and Microsoft for such a horrible experience. I am going back to Linux (SUSE + MythTV), but I am not happy.