Vista - Using a Hauppauge 1250 tuner card - I get channels w/WinTV app but not w/Media Center

Hi Everyone,

I recently got a Dell computer running Vista. I have a Hauppauge 1250 internal tuner card installed and digital signal running through coax from a spliter into my PC. I know that I am getting a signal because when I run WinTV (the application that comes with the Hauppauge tuner) I am able to watch all the digital channels. However, when I try to watch live tv on the media center, all I get is static. I tried consulting with customer support at Hauppauge but no one can seem to help me

Does anyone have any good advice or heard of a similar problem?

Thanks

I just installed a HVR-1600 card in mine. After a frustrating week of trying to fix audio drop-outs in live TV I abandoned Win TV for VMC.

During the setup process you need to choose to set up manually.
Choose DIGITAL if that's what you have. I have an outdoor antenna and I only watch OTA digital so thats what I chose.

MC will then look for digital stations only and set them up. I did find that it only found about 15 out of 27 available in my area. I had to manually add the ones it missed and I wanted. It works pretty good now and I use it to record (PVR).

Edit: If you intend to use VMC exclusively then you might want to run HCWclear.exe to remove WinTV. Then extract your drivers to a folder on your hard drive. When Vista prompts you to reinstall, select your drivers from the folder and do not install WinTV.

the thing came pre-installed. I'm trying to uninstall it now but there is no separate application for media center. Got any ideas?

HCWCLEAR.EXE can be found on Hauppauge's website. Download it and run it. It will uninstall all of the WINTV programs and your drivers.

Go to device manager and delete your tuner from the list.

Restart windows and let Vista rediscover the tuner and install its own drivers.

After restart go to Windows media center and set up your tuner.
You will want to configure for analog first, then when asked about digital antenna say yes. Vista will find your digital channels second. Doing the analog channels allows you access to radio stations.

When setup is complete you can go in the guide section and delete any channels that don't come in and also, as in my case, add digital channels.

ok, i'll give this a shot and let you know - thanks for your help thus far

I tried what you suggested and the problem is that windows cannot find the proper drivers. I bought this computer with all the software already installed. When I restart and the wizard comes up, it asks me to insert the disc that came with my multimedia video controller. I tried using both the OS installation cd as well as the dell driver software cd and neither work. I get a message that says "windows was unable to install your multimedia video controller." It doesn't seem to be able to find the software any other way. Do you have any suggestions?

-Download the WinTV version 6 from the Hauppauge website, they should appear as 4.6+.
-Extract the file to a temporary directory i.e. C:\Temp.
-Upon restarting the computer let Vista fail in finding the drivers.
-When the pop-up appears that prompts you to locate them yourself, browse to the C:\Temp\4.6+ folder and select 'Drivers' folder.
-The Vista drivers for all their cards are in there so you do not need to try to go to the exact file(s).
-Select next and Vista will automatically install what it needs.

For the first step - go to Support for WinTV-HVR-1600
For the second step - Extract it anywhere you have space - since HDs are cheap thees days, I recommend that you extract it somewhere and *keep* it there extracted. When I had my 1800 in Vista, it went belly-up on me 3 different times (in terms of drivers - the card itself is sill working in Windows 7 now). I also don't recommend using C:\temp b/c if other programs have used that in the past, you can get lost quickly - use a brand new directory that you create, even if you don't plan on keeping the directory around after install.
The rest is pretty much self explanatory, except of course that if you don't use C:\temp and use something else, be sure to use that as the location you go looking in....and remember that wherever you extract it to will have a folder inside called 4.6+ just like da180 said.