If you’ve investigated the idea of watching TV through your PC in any real capacity in the last twenty years you would undoubtedly have come across the name Hauppauge. Specialising in TV solutions for the PC since 1992, eventually also incorporating external tuning devices with the advent of USB and other similar standards, Hauppauge are perhaps best known for the WinTV range of PCI, PCI-Express and USB TV Tuners. Over time the capabilities of the hardware and software have also greatly increased, incorporating new Digital TV standards and Personal Video Recording (PVR) capability. It’s no exaggeration to say that they’re pretty much the go-to brand for these sorts of solutions.

With the advent of the High Definition video era demand for dedicated PVR solutions, necessary for recording Cable TV, skyrocketed. Around that time a curious thing also occurred: recording gameplay footage almost overnight become in-demand functionality. And not just PC gameplay, but also for games consoles including the XBOX and Playstation 3. It’s in that burgeoning market that Hauppauge released the HD PVR designed specifically as an external interface between a source device (i.e. console etc.) and the PC for hardware-accelerated video capture. Rather than containing on-board storage it simply encoded HD video in an appropriate format and streamed to the PC over USB for recording to a HDD. Later Hauppauge released the HD PVR Gaming Edition which we reviewed in November 2011, a variant with the appropriate cabling and I/O options for connecting XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 consoles straight out of the box.