Could someone recommend a decent TV tuner card?

[TheVrolok]

Looking for a new TV tuner card, any suggestions would be welcome, thanks.

 

[Peter]

LifeView FlyTV Platinum, $38 from newegg, complete w/ remote. Latest tuner and digitizer chip technology, good picture, supports all TV standards, has working software.

 

[Rottie]

I use ATI Wonder VE PCI card for less 50 buck at compusa it is good but many people did not buy it. It does not have remote but can record any t.v. program, nice t.v. guide schedule, support cable and antenna.

 

[spacelord]

Any good HD tuner cards available?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: spacelord
Any good HD tuner cards available?

There are several these days. I personally have a MyHD MDP-130 which is probably the most "high-end" one - it has a hardware decoder for very low CPU usage, QAM tuning for unencrypted HD over cable, etc. It was about $250.

The ATI HDTV Wonder and the DVICO Fusion 3 are both pretty good as well from what I can tell, and are both around $150. Neither has a dedicated hardware decoder, so CPU usage will be somewhat higher, but on modern systems it isn't really an issue. The ATI will only do OTA (over-the-air, antenna in other words), while the newest version of the Fusion does QAM just like the MyHD does.

Be advised that no current PC HDTV tuner will be able to get the "premium" channels over cable or satellite yet, as they are encrypted and currently the decryption can only be done by the cable/satellite company's set-top box (or very limited numbers of standalone HDTV's with CableCard tuners, etc.). You can sometimes pull the HD streams from the set-top box over Firewire, but I don't have any experience with that specifically. Check out the Home Theater Computers section of AVS Forum for more information on all this stuff.

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: Rottie
I use ATI Wonder VE PCI card for less 50 buck at compusa it is good but many people did not buy it. It does not have remote but can record any t.v. program, nice t.v. guide schedule, support cable and antenna.

That card is way inferior to the FlyTV - it's only mono audio, has just a single-norm tuner, the old BT878 8-bit digitizer. The FlyTV has a far better digitizer chip, worldwide multinorm tuner, full stereo support, and (important for recording) proper audio-through-PCI hardware the BT878 chip lacks completely.

 

[ojai00]

Originally posted by: Peter

Originally posted by: Rottie
I use ATI Wonder VE PCI card for less 50 buck at compusa it is good but many people did not buy it. It does not have remote but can record any t.v. program, nice t.v. guide schedule, support cable and antenna.

That card is way inferior to the FlyTV - it's only mono audio, has just a single-norm tuner, the old BT878 8-bit digitizer. The FlyTV has a far better digitizer chip, worldwide multinorm tuner, full stereo support, and (important for recording) proper audio-through-PCI hardware the BT878 chip lacks completely.

From what I can tell from reading the item description this is a software-encoding card, is it not?

 

[Traire]

yes,

Also, Anand should be posting a review of the ATi Theater 550 card sometime today. The 550 is ATi's newest chip, and has hardware mpg2 encoding, and a great 3D/2D comb filter. The picture quality is supposed to be far superior to any previous ATi TVwonder/Allinwonder with the Theater 200 chip. The only problem I have seen so far is that the bundled software is fairly simple, with not many advanced features.

The Saphire and Powercolor versions can be found for $75-90 online.

 

[Peter]

Yes, the plain FlyTV Platinum has no encoder chip. If you want one, get the FlyTV MCE. Same excellent tuner and digitizer hardware, plus an MPEG2 encoder chip.

 

[Rottie]

Originally posted by: Peter

Originally posted by: Rottie
I use ATI Wonder VE PCI card for less 50 buck at compusa it is good but many people did not buy it. It does not have remote but can record any t.v. program, nice t.v. guide schedule, support cable and antenna.

That card is way inferior to the FlyTV - it's only mono audio, has just a single-norm tuner, the old BT878 8-bit digitizer. The FlyTV has a far better digitizer chip, worldwide multinorm tuner, full stereo support, and (important for recording) proper audio-through-PCI hardware the BT878 chip lacks completely.

Well I don't care much about stereo/audio because I am hearing impaired and I am happy with my card because it has closed captioned that I need to watch.

 

[Peter]

Ah

Closed captioning is a mere software feature (decoding the binary data embedded into a handful of lines of video signal off the bottom end of the screen); any of today's video digitizer chips will catch the raw signal to let the software do this. Unless they're so incredibly bandwidth limited (USB 1.x!) that the signal resolution fed into the system is blurring the "data signal" too much. On PCI that of course never happens ...

 

[TheVrolok]

Originally posted by: Peter
LifeView FlyTV Platinum, $38 from newegg, complete w/ remote. Latest tuner and digitizer chip technology, good picture, supports all TV standards, has working software.

It's out of stock at newegg and I can't find this card anywhere else, I, however, may simply be not looking in the right places. Do you have any idea where I could find one? Or perhaps a second option? You're advice has been tremendous. I really was looking forward to picking up one of these cards.

 

[TheVrolok]

bumpage for ^^

 

[trickytraka]

Important question! Where do you leave?

 

[Peter]

If you're suffering an emergency there, you could buy one from Liveview's online store. They're asking $60 though.

http://www.lifeview.com/usa "Where to buy" section.