Rated 
Junky product - should not be sold
Started Mar 29, 2007
Strengths: None found except that it can do HDTV
Weaknesses: Lots of them, see my comments
I've had the worst experience with this card.
Ever since HDTV cable became popular, I wanted to watch TV in HD on my computer. This was one of the first HD tuners.
First of all, the software is crap. SnapStream's BeyondTV is a monster full of bugs.
* When I switch to Live TV mode, it takes 10-15 seconds before it actually shows me the live TV. Moreover, it's not LIVE at all, it's a live feed delayed by 5-10 seconds, making it pretty hard to change channels on my cable box or go through the channel guide with my cable remote. I press a button and wait 5 seconds for things to change - completely unacceptable.
By the way, I've just recently upgraded to Vista, and now the delay jumped up to 10 seconds.
* Beyond TV doesn't know how to work with your OS well, the screen saver in particular. First, it doesn't disable the screen saver after I switch into Full Screen mode. 15 minutes later the screen saver kicks in. I press a button on my keyboard to go back to watching TV, and Beyond TV hangs my computer for 30 seconds (!!!!), then starts showing the stuff I was watching 15 minutes ago -- yes, it has been recording from the moment I switched to Live TV, and now it's showing me exactly that. I have to stop and restart Live TV mode - additional 15 seconds.
* Here's another quirk - after the steps above, Beyond TV completely disables the screen saver - so my computer can sit in an UNLOCKED mode for days, which means anyone can read my e-mail/documents/etc, unless I specifically lock my computer with WindowsKey+L. I contacted SnapStream but wasn't given any answer on the screen saver problem. Upgrading to the latest version didn't help.
* Poor configuration settings - I don't care about the DVR features but there doesnt' seem to be a way to disable them. all I want to do is watch live TV. Can't seem to find where to disable it from downloading channel lineup too - I don't need it either.
* It requires that you register when installing, e.g. create an account on their site. C'mon guys, all I want to do is watch TV.
* Video is choppy and stops once in a while, especially when in Full Screen mode. I have a pretty good video card and a Pentium Core 2 Duo, so it's not my computer to blame here. I've tried using antenna input, S-Video, and Composite, and even a different cable box altogether - same situation.
* The card is not recognized by the Microsoft Media Center in Vista; otherwise I would have gotten rid of BeyondTV.
I'm not sure if most of the problems I'm having is due to the bad hardware or software but frankly I don't care.
I used to have a Hauppauge card, which worked for me for over 7 years. I moved it between 3 different computers and 3 operating systems in those years (Win98, Win2000, WinXP) and never had any problems.
Now that Hauppauge finally has a HDTV tuner (released Feb07, as they had promised me via e-mail), I'm going to order one from them.
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