Because of recent reports of Hauppauge WinTV cards not working with Media Center, I installed my WinTV PCI card and did some testing.
With the latest WDM driver from Hauppauge, I had no problem starting TV, changing channels, and recording to files.
However, I had a major problem doing time-shifting. It simply does not work. The worst thing is that I can not even debug my program. The WinTV driver has a serious bug that prevents me from running the program in debugger! It is not just my program. I could not debug the Microsoft's DirectShow sample program either.
Out of frustration I decided to try the third party generic driver from here
http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/. It works perfectly!
So, if you are having problem with your Hauppauge WinTV card, you may want to try this driver. The currently available version is 5.3.5.
However, I must warn you that
1. This is a third party driver. It worked for me, but may not work for you. Therefore you should not try it if you are not slightest adventurous.
2. Read the installation instruction carefully before making installation. For example, the instruction says you
should not uninstall any driver before installing the new driver. Also, during the installation you will have to make quite a few selections, such as the maker of your card, the type of the tuner, your locality, etc. Be prepared to answer those questions.
I should also mention that I installed this driver on a Window XP machine with DirectX 8.1b on it. I have not tried DirectX 9 yet. That will happen tomorrow.
Yaobing
An update:
I have found a work-around for the time-shifting problem I mentioned above. It will be in the next build. With this work-around, I am able to use Hauppauge's driver without a problem. But I know some people would still have trouble using their Hauppauge card, so this generic driver is still an option for those people.
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Topic: Generic Driver works great for WinTV PCI card (Read 1933 times)