Here comes Hauppauge's first 3 in 1 tuner

Dec 21, 2006 10:09 GMT  ·  By

You all know Hauppauge so I don't think that I should tell you more than you want to know about them. All that needs to be said here is the following: if you need a crazy tuner that can record a program via mpeg2 hardware compression and watch another in HD at the same time, you need a Hauppauge tuner. I'm not saying that they are the only ones who provide such solutions but they seem to manufacture some rock solid tuners. One could say that the Hauppauge brand always translates into more performance on the same space.

For example, the new WinTV-HVR-3000 can tune into three different video sources, the tri-mode TV tuner can decode DVB-S, DVB-T terrestrial and classical analogue cable sources. The new tuner also supports FM reception along with DVB-S and DVB-T audio broadcasts.

In terms of recording, the WinTV-HVR-3000 can store audio and video in MPEG2 or MPEG1 formats. And in case you need direct MPEG4 compression, there's always plenty of additional software you can use on the web. Provided you have a powerful CPU since the compression is software based. An IR remote is also included for use with the Hauppauge WinTV software as well but I guess that's no surprise.

Some things need to be added here. We don't know if the tuner supports HD DVB-T transmissions that use MPEG4 AVC (H.264) instead of the standard MPEG2 encoding. Moreover, the tuner does not support DVBS2 (same modulation as DVBS but uses the same H.264 encoding). And to clarify things even further, the tuner does not work with DAB radio stations but only DVB-T/S ones. Price and availability are unknown at the moment.