I bought a Vistaview DA-1in1-I from PCalchemy which had them on sale for $69.99. Seemed like a good deal and it had the LG chip that I’ve heard good things about and it came in PCI. I took out my HVR-1600 and put in the Vistaview. My hopes was that it would tune in channels a little better and more solidly than the Hauppage. I’m running SageTV. After installation and re-setup of Sage, the digital tuner was working, but could never get the analog portion to work. Maybe a complete fresh install of the system might get it to work, but I felt like that was a longshot and wasn’t about to go through the trouble. If I had had room to keep both the Hauppage and the Vistaview in then I might have and used the Hauppage for analog and the Vistaview for digtial. I believe it was better at tuning the digital OTA stations than the Hauppage.
I took the Vistaview out and tried it in my son’s PC that is running MCE ’05. After installation and re-setup of MCE, I found that the analog portion was working fine on his computer. Now, I couldn’t test the digital tuner in his PC because I don’t have a cable from the antenna in his room, so I can only assume that the digital side would’ve worked as well and that analog and digital could have been used at the same time. The main thing I was trying to accomplish was prove to myself that nothing was wrong with the card or the S-Video input. If anyone remembers, I was complaining not too long ago about the very poor quality of my son’s PVR-150. I can say that after trying the Vistaview in his PC that the 150 does indeed have poor quality because I thought the analog on the Vistaview was much, much better. People’s faces did not tend to be blocky and blurry like with the 150. Now I have to decide whether to keep the $70 card and leave it in his PC and pretty much “waste” the digital tuner or sell it to a guy at work that said he’ll buy it for that price (and I lose the shipping I paid). It seems like combo cards are disappearing, especially the PCI type. Maybe I should just hang on to it?
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