It's definitely a low-powered little thing, so unless you live near the heart of a city, you should assume that you'll have to provide your own antenna. The little antenna included in the box has a range of about 10 miles, which did pretty much no good in my testing environment.

You can switch to fullscreen, which hides the on-screen controls. Broadcast/Streaming Quality Watching live TV with the device. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, and it doesn't measure up to the nice interfaces you'll find on some OTA DVRs, but it's perfectly functional. For similar reasons, the program comes with picture-in-picture functionality.Īccessing recordings can be done through the application – you click a button and it opens up a file browser, just like you were opening a new document in Word or something like that. You can also set manual recordings – and, since this is a dual tuner, you can watch one channel while recording another. The program automatically saves the video from the channel you're watching as it comes in, so you can rewind to a point if you've missed something. Then you open up the program, scan for channels (again, a pretty automated process), and enjoy!įlipping channels is easy through either the on-screen controls or with the included remote. In both cases, you'll just follow some simple prompts (and perhaps negotiate with your overzealous anti-virus software). You plug in the device and antenna, pop in the CD, and click first to install the drivers and then to install the WinTV program. Setting up the WinTV-dualHD tuner is very easy, though it's very much an old-school Windows installation and not one of those crisp one-click affairs that many cord cutters may have grown used to. The USB extender is a nice touch, and the remote was really convenient when watching TV.

The little antenna is pretty underpowered (more on that later), but the rest of the hardware is great and looks pretty good, if a bit utilitarian. There's a bit more in the box, though, including a USB extender (in case the little stick doesn't fit in your setup), a small antenna (10 mile range), a tiny remote (it's the size and shape of a credit card) with a battery, and an installation CD. The WinTV-dualHD tuner itself is a little USB stick with a coaxial jack on one side. As always, this won't affect our objectivity. In this case, Hauppauge was kind enough to send us a free device. It's our policy to always let readers know up-front if we're reviewing devices we got for free.

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