Can someone recommend me a good tv tuner?

[SofaKing]

I'm looking for a quality tv tuner..preferably $50 or under, or in that range.

this is what i'm looking to purchase.. but does anyone have a better card to recommend at a similar price?

would
thisor a hauppauge card be better? i'm trying to figure out whether each brands are worth the price difference..

 

[Kishan]

i'm looking for one as well, but everyone tells me to get the hauppauge pvr150, NOT the MCE. Should be 89 bucks.

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you want to record, the Hauppage non-MCE PVR-150 is the best choice under $100.

If you just want to watch TV, or record and don't mind possibly having a few dropped frames or audio sync glitches, the Leadtek TV2000 cards are pretty popular.

 

[Childs]

BUDGET

In the $50-$60 range, both Nivida and Ati have hardware encoding TV tuners.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
If you want to record, the Hauppage non-MCE PVR-150 is the best choice under $100.

Just as a note (since this is not very clear in most places I've looked), the only difference between the PVR150 and the PVR150-MCE is that the "MCE" card does not include the remote or their recording software (since Windows MCE includes recording capabilities, and any system sold with it is supposed to have a remote already). If you intend to use something like BeyondTV, SageTV, or MythTV, and you already have (or don't want/need) their remote, you can just get the PVR150-MCE.

Software encoding cards like the Leadtek work OK, but bog down your CPU pretty heavily whenever you are recording. I ended up switching from an ATI TV Wonder VE to two PVR150-MCEs, so that I could record two programs at once with my HTPC and not have to worry about CPU usage issues (so that I could use ffdshow/DScaler on the output).

 

[Edward Lee]

I own an ATI TV Wonder VE Romote Control Edition. Aside from the price I'm happy with it.
Looking at the Leadtek one I'm sorta wishing I got that one instead (I paid $99.00 for mine)
But the good thing about the ATI is it comes with good softward for using the remote and TV tuner. I'm not that sure about the leadtek model.

 

[goog]

I've got both an ATi Radeon AIW and a LeadTek Winfast XP2000 deluxe (never did figure out what's deluxe about it). The ATi is easily the superior of the two. I've never been very satisfied with the Winfast card. Granted the Expert has two extra bits to improve on the picture quality. The reception while decent has a couple issues the ATi doesn't.

For the price can't complain a whole lot, quality is ok in most cases and with a decent rig CPU usage isn't that much of an issue (P4 2.8GB). Another thing I don't like is the lack of a pause on their software like ATi has. Trying to use SageTV etc won't work since they require hardware encoding.

 

[SofaKing]

Originally posted by: Childs
BUDGET

In the $50-$60 range, both Nivida and Ati have hardware encoding TV tuners.

is the store trustable?