I got hold of one of Hauppauge devices for testing.
Setting it up in MC is straight-forward. Here are what happened after I plugged the USB device onto my computer.
1. Windows (7) tried to find driver for the device but ended up saying it could not find one.
2. I could have inserted the disk that came with the device and run installation from the DVD. Since I do not need to install the Hauppauge application, I decided to go to Hauppauge site (
http://www.hauppauge.com/) to download the driver.
3. On Hauppauge's main page, I clicked Support, and chose my device (the second item on the right-side column, WinTV-HVR-950Q WinTV-HVR-955Q).
4. On the next page I clicked "Driver" tab, and then clicked Download. The instruction on the Hauppauge page says to unzip the downloaded package, go into the folder, and run HCWDRIVERINSTALL.EXE. That does not seem to be the correct instruction since the downloaded file is an EXE file itself - wintv-hvr-850_95xq_driver_all.exe. I double-clicked the downloaded file, and it started installation. I was asked to confirm installation of something from Hauppauge a couple of times during the installation process. In the end, I needed to restart my computer.
5. After rebooting, the device is ready to be used in MC. I tried tuning to some ATSC channels. I also ran a channel scan on it. It found all channels that I expected to find. So the device works well in MC. Please note that when using the device in MC, the device's names are "Hauppauge Cx23100 BDA ATSC Tuner" for digital TV and "Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-955q (1114xx ATSC/QAM)" for analog TV.
6. If it is the first time you use TV feature in MC, or the first time you install a TV device on your computer, you need to run TV setup in MC. You can follow the steps described in
the TV setup wiki.7. The device comes with a foot-long USB extension cable which I find handy. You can plug the device directly into a USB port, but with a hard stick sticking out from the port, I am always afraid that I might accidentally put force on it and cause damage to the device and my USB port. Using the extender allows you to let the device rest on your desk instead of sticking out from your computer.
8. The device is a hybrid device, which means you can use it to either tune to ATSC TV or to analog cable TV. It also comes with A/V connectors that allow you to capture video with it, through composite or SVideo.
