Hauppauge WinTV DCR-2650 Dual Cable Card Tuner For US Market!

Good to see. Hopefully even more tuners come out.
The only issue with getting two of these, is that you pay for an extra M-card every month. At least that'd be true with Comcast.

CFC

Looks good except its a USB model which means an external box and another wall wart. If they had an internal version that would be better.

I don't get it, don't they make the hdhomerun thing too?

The Ceton card does have a half-height bracket for those cases that require low-profile cards. My current HTPC case uses such cards.

Hauppauge's Facebook page announcing the dual tuner WinTV-DCR-2650, which it developed in partnership with SiliconDust

great price! I hope that forces ceton to lower their price (again).

I'm not a huge fan of hauppauge, though. in my experience, they make pretty decent hardware, but the drivers are terrible.

My only concern is that, with the way WMC works with back to back recordings, you may find yourself needing more than two tuners quite a bit.

The defautl way WMC records shows is to use the same tuner if the two shows are back to back. No matter how perfectly you want to time things, this usually causes part of the second show to be record onto the end of the first show. Obviously, this is a problem.

The solution is to setup WMC to record 10 minutes after the show stops. NOT 10 minutes after if possible..but the one that forces it to happen. This means that if you have two sets of shows recording back to back (2 shows at 9:30 and 2 shows at 10:30), you will have 4 tuners in use 3 or 4 minutes before the hour through 10 minutes after the hour.

Have you all noticed this is a M-Card only tuner - no ATSC reception??? Or can this tune ClearQAM from cable and OTA ATSC? The HDHomeRun-Prime can do them all, right?

Just like Ceton, we are getting the OTA channels from cable company.

"The WinTV-DCR-2650 is a collaboration between Hauppauge and Silicon Dust."

So basically this is just the usb 2 tuner HD homerun they were already talking about getting the Hauppauge branding.

The price is interesting since they are taking a shot at their own ethernet product. Its not really more competition per se but its a lot more likely to have widespread adoption. A lot more people can handle a usb dongle over having to configure a home network (not counting the typical connection to an isp provided router with a WEP key printed on the bottom...sigh) let alone having the courage to bring a screwdriver near a computer.

Its still a good thing for the rest of us using cablecards, the more the merrier. It will provide extra pressure on the service providers to get their act together on installs and support issues for things besides their crappy STBs, and bring more attention to improper billing as well.

How locked down are recordings that you make with these things? I'm sure stuff like HBO but what about if you record stuff off of say ESPN or the like? Can you freely replay them using any software or at least windows media center on any PC or once you go to a new motherboard new system everything is lost?

HMm I bet even if you ever switch cable cards go with a different provider, quite service and hand the card back then all the protected content is boom lost. So the question is how much content gets protected in that way?

Does anyone know how FiOS handles cablecard? Pricing and sneaky issues? Verizon is a tricky place to get solid, upfront info from so if anyone has any real first hand experience....

Depending on the provider, some providers lock the recording and you won't be able to play other than the recorded HTPC, like myself. Other users report it does not lock and they're able to play from different PCs. This is based on my Ceton experience and I think this one will be the same and it really depending on your provider not the tuner.

I believe it comes down to your windows install. If you reformat you lost it all. So better to make an image as soon as everything is set up and working.

Thanks.

Does anyone have any experience with how FiOS in NJ does it?
I couldnt find much on their site other than some channels require no copy, single copy, or unlimited. No list was given.

Ironically, with a STB I can at least use the component out and feed into HD PVR.

You might have a better luck to find out your answer from the other Centon thread.

Any one of below will upset PlayReady and trigger Recorded TV/Live TV not playable until you reset the PlayReady.

CPU change
Clean Windows installation
Clear CMOS/BIOS (not sure???)

Hmm I just saw a couple people on a Broadband forum claim that Fios, as of June this year, had nothing protected on any channel. Seems hard to believe and maybe they haven't tried to copy recordings to a new computer yet but they seemed to claim they worked in anything.

In each recording if it is lock, it will mark "Copy Protected".

They all are copy free but just won't play in other PCs.

CableCARD tuners are the biggest disappointment to me since I discovered that there is no Easter Beagle. Granted, the magnitude of the horribleness of the experience is greatly influenced by your provider, but in my case, I would rather shave my head with a cheese grater than put another CableCARD tuner in place as part of my MCE setup. Here are the top 2 issues that I encounered:
1). SDV. Time Warner and other providers have implemented SDV in their signal delivery architecture. This presents them with the opportunity to provide us with a wonderful piece of technology (not the first noun that came to mind) called Tuning Adapters, which are required for OCUR CableCARD devices to work. The Cisco TAs that TWC provided locked up 3 times a week and just completely made life hell.
2). DRM. This is the major turd in the punchbowl. Period. If a program has a 5C flag of anything other than Copy Once, that recording is completely locked down. It can't be played on any other pc, commercial skipping applications cannot analyze them, they cannot be burned to dvd....they can only be played back, and only on that computer, in the same condition in which is was recorded. Of course, time warner flags everything except the locals as Copy Once, completely crippling any CableCARD implementation.
I've gone to a dual HDPVR setup using DVBLogic. This allows for completely DRM-free recordings, tuner sharing across my client PCs, and a very happy MCE setup, regardless of my provider.

Agree with the HD-PVR for DRM-free recordings but then you have to deal with the IR blasters for the channel changing within WMC which can sometimes be a hit or miss.

DRM does suck though, no doubt about that. If the shows were worth locking down that much then they would actually be worth watching.

Actually, one of the reasons I chose that board is because it has a firewire port. I'm using 4 gb of RAM, so no reason not to go with 32 bit Windows, so I use firewire for channel changing. Works like a champ! Never missed a channel change.

Believe what you want, but it is true for NoVA/MD FIOS on all but a handful of premium channels (HBO etc) and one or two oddball specific shows (none I'll ever record).

Either the copy flag is set or its not, and you can tell right away from the tuner diagnostics for that channel. No extra "testing" is required.

I plan on testing out shows via linux with the prime once I get it (have a ceton in use in MD right now) and you can't get farther away from DRM than that.


Greatly is an understatement, since your two issues are 100% the fault of their equipment and settings, not the tuner itself.

The only issues I had were install issues, and I had worse problems with my tivo (still not quite fixed). Considering their own STB died on me (even while on a UPS, so it failed all by itself) with a far worse interface and 0 extra features, a one time headache was nothing to cut monthly fees and get more.


Anyways at $130 and a little computer magic help from me I think some relatives are going to be ditching their STBs too.

If you have a provider that does not implement 5C and SDV, then yeah, CableCARD is fine. TWC totally ruins it, though.

FIOS has none of those issues. They don't use SDV and, AFAIK, none of their channels are copy protected. I dropped HBO/Cinemax a few months back because they jacked up the rates and never bothered to tell me that I was also paying for Cinemax, which I never watched. As a result, I can't confirm if they have any of the HBO/Cinemax channels flagged. Verizon was charging me something like $23.99 per month for the premium channel. My cost savings in one year will just about pay for an InfiniTF4 at the current price. I find that I can still get the shows I watched on HBO through other means.

I still think the Ceton InfiniTV4 is the best deal for a cablecard tuner. The initial cost may be more, but when you consider the overall cost of the extra cablecards in the long run, it actually costs you less than either the HDHomeRun Prime or the Hauppauge if you decide to go with more than three tuners. It's always been my experience that you can never have enough tuners. My HTPC currently has two Ceton InfiniTV4's and two Hauppauge 2250's, for a total of 12 tuners. I haven't activated the 2nd Ceton yet, but I plan to do so before the end of the summer when the new fall lineups kick into gear.

Two tuners is fine if you're just using the PC as a remote tuner for a single TV and only record an occasional TV show. However, once you start using a DVR you tend to start recording more shows because you now have the opportunity to eliminate scheduling conflicts where you used to watch shows in real time. You'll find that you can also watch more shows in less time than before because you don't have to waste time sitting through commercial breaks. A typical 60-minute TV program has about 16-18 minutes of commercials.

Does anyone know the power requirement of the dcr2650? I am wondering if it can run it off of a usb port. I have a Asrock vision 3d and it has plenty of usb ports. i currently have 4 950q's attached so I am really interested in getting two dcr2650. I wonder how much comcrap will charge me for 2 cablecards? encryption really bites!

The only time I ran into FiOS having a flag set was during an NFL game...and it was set to copy never. I think it was set in error, for that means NO recording of the game...no DVRing at all.

At MissingRemote a user (Ganjagadget) found the link to the store http://store.hauppauge.com/Pro&#8203...4​&VisID but unfortunately the price is $149. So I made a post on their Facebook page regarding this, hopefully we'll get some info soon on the Pre-order!

is the link broken for everyone else?

EDIT-- nevermind i got it to work....pre ordered two....hoping this will be a cooler solution then my Ceton which runs incredibly hot