Hauppauge WinTV-PVR USB2 review

With large text on its box claiming you can "Watch TV anywhere!", you'd be forgiven for thinking that Hauppauge has discovered some ingenious way of streaming TV direct to your mind, but disappointingly that's not the case.

Upon opening the box, we discovered that the company has simply repackaged one of its analogue TV tuners and added some third-party software that enables you to stream TV channels from home to a mobile device, using an internet connection.

The TV tuner itself is pretty basic. It can only receive analogue broadcasts, which limits viewing to the five terrestrial channels. The tuner software is Hauppauge's archaic WinTV 2000 application. It looks ugly and thanks to fiddly buttons and a separate scheduling application, isn't easy to use.

The streaming of content to mobile devices is done by a different piece of software called Orb. This can be downloaded free from www.orb.com, though there are only a handful of compatible TV tuners at present. Orb can stream audio, video and photo files from your home PC as well as TV channels. Setup is straightforward, with it scanning for TV channels and then asking you which folders you want to share, but you'll have to leave both the tuner and your computer switched on if you want to stream TV channels.

Any device with a browser and media player should be able to receive content via Orb. Just log-in to the Orb website and then use the browser to select content from your PC at home, whether that's media files or TV channels. The browser then hands the file over to your media-playing software for playback. A standard 256Kbit/s broadband connection gave us a watchable, but heavily compressed TV picture.

Just as interesting is the streaming of photo, audio and recorded video files. Though unfortunately for Hauppauge, this can be achieved without the company's tuner just by downloading the free Orb software.

If you really want to stream televsion from your home to a mobile device, then you're much better off with the more expensive Slingbox (reviewed in issue 184), which has a digital tuner built-in and doesn't require you to leave your computer on.

Author: Seth Barton