The biggest problem I had was with the video performance. Since I know my system is perfectly fine for HDTV, I knew the problem was with the software. For one reason or another, the program doesn’t default to what should work best but it defaults to what it thinks is best. So at its default setting with my system, the video was very “choppy” and “skippy.” In order to achieve good playback, I had to use the Hauppauge utility called “Primary,” shown below.

    

What it does is allow you to change how the video is rendered. I believe WinTV2000 defaults to VMR9 (but I’m not certain), so after changing things to VMR7 and Allow Overlay, things got much better. It did seem though that sometimes the settings wouldn’t stick, but I was eventually able to get good playback. So then everything is fine, right? Not quite- changing these settings then affected whether I could watch video on a dual monitor setup. After trying to figure out what settings worked well and what didn’t, I was able to get good playback on either display. OK then, right? Nope, because when I tried to watch video full screen on the secondary display the video would show up on the primary display. I guess it doesn’t support dual monitors, although I don’t know if Hauppauge ever states it does, so that’s just wishful thinking on my part I suppose. Another issue dealing with the video was how aspect ratios are dealt with. There are a couple of settings suggesting that they do something in that regard, but at least for me they didn’t. When going full screen, the video would stretch from top to bottom on a 1280x1024 display. The video should be letterboxed but I couldn’t get it right. The video/main program also can’t be sized automatically to 16x9 fixed resolutions, as there are only 4x3 ratios available to choose from. Then there is another issue when going full screen- how do you change the channels? Since no remote is included with the HVR-950, only the keyboard works then. There is no other window that could allow for using a mouse to control things like the volume and changing channels. So you have to use the program with the video attached to the main controls or just have a video window with nothing. The program is just lacking in many ways- it just doesn’t seem “finished.” Since the WinTV2000 application is mostly the same across all their tuners, I wonder if it would still seem as bad when using just an analog tuner. Overall, the program just doesn’t seem well designed, as things should be much easier to use. I was rather disappointed with Hauppauge’s program as I thought it would be quite a bit better. What I think may be happening though is that Hauppauge assumes or knows many of its users will use MCE with the tuners, so they don’t need their program to be “that good.”