The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
HDTV Tuner Recommendations?
fforde
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am about to cancel my cable service, buy a HDTV antenna and tuner (my TV doesn't have one built in) and just pick up the channels broadcast over the air waves in my area. I am probably going to go with this antenna, but I am having a hard time finding any good reviews on HDTV Tuners. Any of you have any recommendations?
fforde on
0
Posts
You may want to invest in an amplified antenna, I couldn't get singal for crap (or possibly it was a multi-path issue) with a passive antenna (though I didn't try one of those bigass channel-masters with 30 or 40 odd elements). Amplified antennae are powered and are attached to a power outlet with a transformer block. I cannot find the one I got but it looks like this: http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2103916&cp=2032057.2032187.2032189.2032204&parentPage=family ... except it provided 45dB of gain. "number"dB tells you how much the signal is getting boosted. Got my parents this and it seems to work good: http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Specifications-of-Philips-Indoor-Antenna-MANT510/sem/rpsm/oid/158312/rpem/ccd/productDetailSpecification.do#tabs ...
Also you'll find positioning (and gain boost) can affect reception greatly. I sometimes have to muck with the positioning to get a good digital signal from CW network.
The Hauppage card comes with basic software for recording and watching TV ( analog and digital and HDTV), but beyond TV is amazing software, and with the plug ins (not free) you can stream live TV or recorded TV to other computers on your network.
Are you asking for set-top HDTV tuners? That's what I'm guessing, and not a PC card for a computer.
I've heard some good things about the Samsung tuners. What kind of price range do you have? I saw one for about $130.
I don't believe it - I'm on my THIRD PS3, and my FIRST XBOX360. What the heck?
In that case a good place to get all the info you would need is at www.avsforum.com, or more specifically this section: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=6
RyakStorm: I was reading up on the Hauppauge card you linked me, but it said the hardware mpeg2 encoder only worked for analog signals. I am assuming that this means it wont work for HD signals eh? That could kind of be a problem for me. My computer could probably handle encoding itself, but I would much rather have the card do all the heavy lifting. So you actually have this card, am I misreading the specs? You have any comments in general about your experiences with HD signals with that card?
Thanks for all the replies so far everyone.
When playing live HD TV, the CPU is at about 20% so I would say that either playing back HD is light weight work, or the card is doing the work, or some of it.
It works great great for me, the card is connected to a little indoor boosted Phillips antenna, we live about 50 miles from the broadcast source, which is on the outer edge of acceptable range, especially with a indoor antenna, all the channels are at 70% signal to noise, which means they all come clear and stutter free with no blocking.
The Beyond TV package is an excellent PVR I think, it removes the ads on things it recorded, you can have it convert the raw Mpeg2 streams to pretty much any other format, or just burn to DVD, you can also set it up for access over the web, so you can program it while away from home. With the Beyond TV Link add on, any other computer on the network can watch live TV (will also work over the internet, but you'd need big bandwidth for HD, but you can stream compressed versions of recorded shows pretty well), or access all the PVR controls and recorded shows - pretty sweet. Beyond TV has free trial versions, but I guess that doesn't help you much as you don't have a capture card yet.
Also with beyond TV you can have it access as many tuner cards as you can install, so with two cards installed you can watch a channel while recording another, I've seen setups with six capture cards, so every computer in the house can watch a different station and so on. Pretty flexible.