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Any suggestions on a Tuner card for a Desktop?

oniianoniian Registered User regular
edited February 2008 in Help / Advice Forum
Like the title says, I want to add a TV tuner card to my desktop PC. Any suggestions or pointers would be appreciated. Any cards to avoid in particular?

oniian on

Posts

  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    hauppage, get a hauppage card. The 150 line is cheap, and good for entry level, but it's not HD. It's really cheap now though, so you could add two and record and pause live tv.

    The 250 series and up are HD compatible.

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  • DaenrisDaenris Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    amateurhour wrote: »
    hauppage, get a hauppage card. The 150 line is cheap, and good for entry level, but it's not HD. It's really cheap now though, so you could add two and record and pause live tv.

    The 250 series and up are HD compatible.

    No... the 250 and 350 (and 500) are still just SD. To get an HD tuner you need one of the Hauppauge HVR cards (not PVR which are SD). I haven't used any of their HD tuners, but their SD ones are pretty cheap now and great to use, though I've heard some bad things about the 250 (and for that matter I've heard the 150 product quality went down in the past couple years).

    Here are the specs for their SD cards:
    http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/compare/compare_pvr.html

    and here's the HD ones:
    http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/compare/compare_hvr.html

    Though like I said, I haven't used the HD ones so can't really say whether they're any better than another brand.

    Daenris on
  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    thanks for the correction. I've got a couple 150's on my setup and they work great.

    Do the HVR series cards have the same number series? I was just wondering why I was so off there.

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  • DaenrisDaenris Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    amateurhour wrote: »
    thanks for the correction. I've got a couple 150's on my setup and they work great.

    Do the HVR series cards have the same number series? I was just wondering why I was so off there.

    Nope, they start at like 950 and have numbers ranging up from there (950, 1250, 1500, 1600, 1800).

    Daenris on
  • DjeetDjeet Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    I got a dirt cheap "K-world" ATSC-110 and it works pretty good. It took me about an hour of futzing with the powered UHF antenna before I could receive most channels. As it stands I can get everything except the CW, and if I adjust the antenna to get the CW, then I start to lose other channels. I'm probably going to get a better antenna and install it in the attic. If you have a Fry's Electronics nearby, every month or so the brick-and-mortar stores put a ATSC PC tuner card (usually K-world) for real cheap.

    The software it comes with "Beyond TV" is only OK, the user interface is not the best but it does its job. It's a trial, upgrading it to "full" set me back another 30$. I lost the remote pretty early on so I cannot remark on it.

    Djeet on
  • ASimPersonASimPerson Cold... ... and hard.Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    If this is for Windows, DScaler is probably still your best bet for tuner software, though I don't know how recent the hardware support is.

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  • oniianoniian Registered User regular
    edited February 2008
    I guess it is worth mentioning that I dual boot to either XP Pro or Ubuntu as my OS. It would be nice to have one that works with either OS. I also see that a lot of the hauppage cards specify that they are compatible with XP Media Center editions.

    oniian on
  • amateurhouramateurhour One day I'll be professionalhour The woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
    edited February 2008
    oniian wrote: »
    I guess it is worth mentioning that I dual boot to either XP Pro or Ubuntu as my OS. It would be nice to have one that works with either OS. I also see that a lot of the hauppage cards specify that they are compatible with XP Media Center editions.

    Hauppage brand cards have the best linux driver resource, so that's not a problem. `

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