Hauppage WinTV Nova-S PCI

I have two of these cards in my PVR running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and MythTV 0.23 . I can't comment on the Windows implementation, but on Linux this card records reliably and my PVR machine runs continuously for months at a time, 24x7. The card is recognized automatically in the MythBuntu distribution with no need to compile any drivers.

With two of these cards installed I noticed a lot of additional heat in my PC case. I have fitted a 80mm case fan in addition to the single PSU fan which helps keep the case temperature down. With hindsight, I should have fitted a 120mm dia fan with thermal control as the PC is now too noisy for the lounge.

I use a Playstation3 to watch my recordings. Picture quality and surround sound are perfect, I have never noticed any lip sync problems or any lost frames.

The Hauppage WinTV Nova-S PCI works great as a piece of hardware but the software lets it down. If you sit and watch it it is OK but leave it to record something it freezes all the time.

I purchased this despite the bad reviews (all about the software) after 12 months it crashed once to often and now lives in the bin

I bought the Hauppage WinTV Nova-S PCI TV Tuner card to add to my HTPC. I have an Austar subscription, and I thought it would be neater to incorporate the card in the PC and remove the Austar box from the lounge.

Installation and software setup was quite straightforward.

The problems began when I checked the drivers and found that the network connection for the Hauppage card had little or no connectivity. There is no troubleshooting advice on this (I always read instructions from cover to cover before starting a project). There is an instruction to check the TCP/ICP properties and tick the label for automatic assignment of address. This was the problem. You need to nominate an address. Fortunately the guys on Austech.info were able to give me an address to use. This fixed the driver issue.

The next problem was scanning for channels. I ASSUMED that scanning all satellites would be the thing to do. NO - no channels were found.

Back to Austech forum. Advice to set LNB to aerial settings. These were found in Austar set up.

Use Optus C1 for Australia and Austar. There is no Optus C1 in the supplied Satellite software. I manually added some details found on www. Lyngsat.com for Optus C1, and was finally able to tune in.

The application software, whilst functional, is the type of program you would expect for back room experiments. It works, but there are poor instructions, and it is not intuitive.

I emailed Hauppage for support 7 days ago, but to date there has been no acknowledgement.

In summary. This equipment is well priced at $99(AUD), but be prepared to experiment.

I am now looking for some professional software that will incorporate both the Nova-s and my Digital TV card.