HauppaugeImpactVCB-e PCI Express Video Capture Board 1381

Having in the past ( XP days ) had several Hauppauge WinTV cards and been fully satisfied with them, when updating to Win7 I was looking for a Hauppauge card for installing in the new setup as Win7 rejected my old card as not compatible.I did not want a tuner card as I have several units connected to my computer through a Smart Scart unit (which auto switches to whatever unit is switched on) these units are two set top boxes, a DVD player, a VHS tape and a digital media box, the outputs from the scart to WinTV card are composite.After much searching of the web I found this Impact VCBe for PCI express slot, and decided that was for me.BUT .... here in the UK they are on sale for £90+, but searching on Amazon.com I found that in the USA they are retailing for approx $55. which seems a fair price.Heart in mouth I ordered from the USA and within 10 days the unit arrived ,well packed and secure. The cost was about £35.00 including postage/shipping.I had read that others have had trouble with this card when fitted to Asus motherboards but I have not had any trouble with my Asus P5KPL-AM fitted with Intel 64 bit processor, my video card is also Asus, ( 0db, silent, 1GB ).The Impact card fitted into the small PCI Express slot , and the supplied Win7 TV disc installed and the program was up and running with no problems.Picture quality is great, and I can again watch TV in small desktop screen while doing other things on the computer (ie surfing web or e mailing)I also like the fact that Hauppauge cards pass the AUDIO through with the VIDEO so no problems with sync when recording. (unlike the Compro cards). As a bonus the card also has HDMI outputFirst class Card, , First class service from the supplier in the USA, and a very fair price..

Very good analog video capturing card. Much better than USB cards. Zero dropped frames. Fast. Quality is as good as it can be. I use it to capture old VHS and S-Video recordings.

This card works excellent so long as you are running Windows. Upon installing the Windows drivers on their website, the card appears as a video device and has an audio device as well. However, on Windows, there is a lack of stereo audio and no matter what I tried, it would only input mono audio across all software. The quality is fairly standard, it's NTSC at 30 frames which is expected, although the video is noticeably interlaced.However, upon following Hauppauge's (outdated, but not updated) instructions to install the "drivers" for Ubuntu Linux, my entire kernel was bricked. The guide on their site tells you to install some "HWE media tree" apt package from their PPA, which quite literally installs an outdated and broken set of kernel drivers, leading to a bricked kernel and I had to remove the version from grub...This is a genuinely horrendous method of driver installation for Linux and I'm not sure what Hauppauge was thinking. The only discussion I could find regarding installation of the ImpactVCB-e driver was for Ubuntu 12.04, and even that forum post concluded in failure to get it functioning.TL;DR - on Ubuntu 22.04 this card is NOT working and will most likely NOT work on any modern version of Ubuntu/Linux. Works okay on Windows, you get what you paid for.

Works well. Sometimes the included software gives a message that my VHS home movies are copyrighted at the start, but after restarting it usually continues the end. Usually this happens because there is noise or bad spot in the tape which I highly suspect trips the copyright switch. Haven't pursued with Arcsoft to see if there is a fix, but the board itself is high quality and the same for the software. This is a much better solution than the cable adapters you see on the market, because the video processing is done on the card and not by your computer's CPU.

This rating is only for the Hauppauge capture board. I do not use the Win7 software.I have a wired A/V surveillance camera that has not been long term reliable, since Win7, with the standard USB capture devices. I have tried two of the more popular USB models, they would usually go dead within 2 days of steady use and would require a reboot to recover.This device is my solution to the poor USB capture device operation,(I hope).On my Win7 Pro, 64bit machine, the installation was painless. I do need to mention that a 'half height' PCIe bracket was not included, although the instructions mentioned that it was included. My case was using the 'full height' attached bracket.The video surveillance software that I currently use is 'Blue Iris'. This card integrates fairly well with that. Just FYI, this card is also recognized by my VLC media player, free open source software.If anything changes. I will update...May 27, 2013, Update just FYI;This card has been on and working reliably, 24/7 for about 10 days now. If you need to feed a wired camera into your PC, this will work much more reliably than the USB capture devices. My PC has an i5, 3 GHZ, quad core processor, 16 Gig Ram. I have throttled the processor down to 2.3 GHZ to help save a little power. When I am viewing this camera on my capture software (Blue Iris), the average processor usage is about 8%. :) - ken