The WinTV2000 software that ships with the HVR-1600 doesn't seem very mature to me and it draws substantially on CPU resources. Also I've had some problems with recordings that were made when the PC had to be awakened from a sleep state (not every time, however - it seems to be related to the format of the stream at the time recording is initiated). I read that quite a few people have had much more success with WatchHDTV so I decided to give that a whirl.
Well, I miss that there's no TitanTV interface for recording from a guide, but WatchHDTV uses about 75% less CPU power than WinTV2000, both in recording and in playback. I also really like the "Silent Recording" option in the scheduler. Timeshifting and recording seem to initiate much more quickly, although I suspect the 1600's tuner is just inherently slower than others. So far I've only used the HCW decoders in the WatchHDTV's decoders.txt file, but they seem to be working well.
The downside is that right now WatchHDTV defaults to the .dvr-ms file format, but the longer Vista is around, the more players and editors will become compatible with that. VideoReDo edits these .dvr-ms files without a problem and allows a quick save to the standard MPEG-2 (.mpg) file format using the same resolution and bitrate. The WatchHDTV player is also lightweight and does a nice job of getting around a file quickly and at various speeds and jumps that you might prefer. WatchHDTV also has a TS version, but it records the whole channel (both the main channel and any sub-channels) and I think I read something about it not working in a timeshifting mode (only playback of recordings).
If you're curious about software that might be more efficient and responsive in your PC, give WatchHDTV a try.
