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Tuner device
LoM2
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm looking for a TV Tuner device that has both standard (coax) and HD (component or HDMI) capabilities and runs into the PC through a USB interface. I am having a hell of a time finding a device that does both the coax and the HD functionality so I figured I'd ask the internet. Has anyone seen anything like this? Does it exist?
Any help is appreciated...thank you in advance!
Any help is appreciated...thank you in advance!
LoM2 on
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As for HDMI capabilites I'm not sure what you mean. If you're looking for a tv tuner the input is always going to be coax, and you specified that you wanted the PC connection to be usb, so I'm assuming your PC is handling the video output to the tv. If you're looking for something that also has the ability to hook directly to the tv, you're probably looking at something like a tivo set top box. In this case you can hook up your tivo to your pc for playing video files through tivo, but I don't think you could send the video signal from tivo to your pc without a seperate capture card for your pc.
Edit: But basically cable/satellite is what we're looking at here.
Does anything on the Hauppauge product page look close to what you're looking for?
Does that help or make it worse?
The answer then is not really. If you want to watch the full range of cable channels your only options are HDHomeRun Prime, Ceton Infinitv 4 USB, and the Hauppauge WinTV. The ability to get premium cable channels without the box that the cable company gives you is a fairly new development, and as far as I can tell these are literally the only devices that will allow that. A few important notes about these devices:
1) You will still need to rent a cablecard from you cable provider. This will probably be a couple bucks a month.
2) As far as I know these only work with cable, not satellite. I'm not familiar with satellite, and how you would interface with a pc for recording/watching.
3) These are only necessary for premium cable, if you only want to watch your local channels those will be unencrypted and there is a wide variety of tuners that you can get for this.
Hauppauge is one of the leaders in making tv tuners for clearQAM
4) You wont be able to access ondemand type features through these devices. It comes down to two way versus one way communcation. So far no device not built buy a cable company can offer two way communication. So anything that requires communicating with you cable company (like the ondemand service), will only be accessable with a set top box provided from the cable company. I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to interface with a set top box provided by the cable company.
So if you're looking for something that can capture premium channels from cable, and capture video from HDMI/Component video the answer is there isn't one. That being said there are a lot of devices that can capture HD video, and there are devices that can capture premium cable, just not in an all in one setup. There may be such a thing for satellite, but I don't really know.
Additional ideas:
1) If you only want to local channels from cable you can get tuners that are the same size as a usb memory stick, and use the usb port. This plus a nice usb HD capture device would give you the abilities you wanted, whilst taking up about the same amount of space as a single all in one solution.
2) You could also just get a set top box from the cable company and get a nice HD capture device. You could then output the set top box video to the HD capture device, and get the video to your pc that way. This has the advantage of giving you full access to cable and ondemand, also has the ability to switch out the HD input to another device when necessary, and removes any HDCP from your cable signal. The downside here would be getting it all to work in a nice way. By nice way I mean setting up things like using your pc to set automated recordings, change channels, ect. It's probably doable but it will be somewhat difficult to setup.
Edit: Just as a point of clarification, generally a "tuner" is considered a device that will take cable/satellite signal and convert it into something your pc can understand. These will always have coax inputs, and generally they will only have coax inputs. A "capture card/device" is a device that will take video signals (HDMI/Component/Composite/ect.) and turn it into something your computer can understand. These will not be able to take a cable/satellite signal as an input because it's not a standard video signal it's something else. You're probably going to have to get a "tuner" and a "capture card" to do what you want.
Thanks again.
Just want to make sure I'm clear. I would say it definitely doesn't exist for use with premium cable (not the local channels). I would say it probably doesn't exist for clearQAM cable either, but it might. I've haven't really searched exhaustively for this, but everything I've seen has been either a tuner or a capture device, not both. I have no idea if it exists for satellite.