Uploaded March 2011 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
I bought a Hauppage HD PVR yesterday, and I'm extremely impressed with it. The software it comes with doesn't allow you to change the video settings like hue, saturation, brightness, etc, even though you can adjust sliders in it, but the default picture is still very good (all of that can be adjusted through post processing anyway). The only thing thing that's a bit disappointing with the unit, so far, is that it doesn't seem to like component signals that were converted from RGB (such as with my PC-Engine) and it seems to be picky about some older composite sources.
Because this only has component output for your TV, it converts the composite/s-video signals to component before displaying them, and there is a lot of choppiness and graphic oddities when that happens. I haven't messed around with non-component too much, but I've read it can also sometimes have issues with PS1 games on a PS2 that's using a component cable, as well. The software it comes with freaks out and constantly freezes if the PVR itself gets a funky video signal, which took me a while to figure out (that was extremely frustrating), but worked fine once I gave it a non-custom signal.
As a side note, I had a really old Hauppage WinTV card back around 1997/1998 where it only supported coax and s-video input, and it could not handle s-video signals that were converted from an RGB source (I had a supergun to play arcade games on my tv), so this is kind of a similar issue with the RGB PC-Engine. Also, if you're recording a game that starts in 1080i (such as the XMB for PS3) and then the game switches to 720p, the recorded video gets screwed up, so it's easiest just to leave everything at 720p.
Other than that, for recording current HD content straight form a PS3, I really enjoy it. I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, 4gb DDR2 RAM, Q6600 CPU, and have had zero issues with frames dropping while recording to a 7200rpm hard drive (don't remember if the hard drive has 8mb or 16mb cache on it).
I think it is still worthwhile to have a separate device to record older composite signals, though... at least for now.
I bought a Hauppage HD PVR yesterday, and I'm extremely impressed with it. The software it comes with doesn't allow you to change the video settings like hue, saturation, brightness, etc, even though you can adjust sliders in it, but the default picture is still very good (all of that can be adjusted through post processing anyway). The only thing thing that's a bit disappointing with the unit, so far, is that it doesn't seem to like component signals that were converted from RGB (such as with my PC-Engine) and it seems to be picky about some older composite sources.
Because this only has component output for your TV, it converts the composite/s-video signals to component before displaying them, and there is a lot of choppiness and graphic oddities when that happens. I haven't messed around with non-component too much, but I've read it can also sometimes have issues with PS1 games on a PS2 that's using a component cable, as well. The software it comes with freaks out and constantly freezes if the PVR itself gets a funky video signal, which took me a while to figure out (that was extremely frustrating), but worked fine once I gave it a non-custom signal.
As a side note, I had a really old Hauppage WinTV card back around 1997/1998 where it only supported coax and s-video input, and it could not handle s-video signals that were converted from an RGB source (I had a supergun to play arcade games on my tv), so this is kind of a similar issue with the RGB PC-Engine. Also, if you're recording a game that starts in 1080i (such as the XMB for PS3) and then the game switches to 720p, the recorded video gets screwed up, so it's easiest just to leave everything at 720p.
Other than that, for recording current HD content straight form a PS3, I really enjoy it. I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, 4gb DDR2 RAM, Q6600 CPU, and have had zero issues with frames dropping while recording to a 7200rpm hard drive (don't remember if the hard drive has 8mb or 16mb cache on it).
I think it is still worthwhile to have a separate device to record older composite signals, though... at least for now.
