Best TV Tuner for $45 or under?

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NeoThoR

Gawd
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Mar 7, 2004
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Whats the best one out there for $45 or under (TV Tuner?)


I'm looking for one.. and a decent one. But I've never actually owned or used one.


Help me out here :)
 
hey neo, go to compusa, they have the PVR-150 hauppauge on sale right now, 99.99 msrp with 10.00 instant rebate, and 20.00 mail in rebate for a total of 69.99... (prices are shown without tax on 90.00). its not under 45.00 but trust me, i took a long time figuring out which PVR tvtuner to get... and this model also has a remote and allows for recordings like a TIVO setup with free scheduling, some other ones require membership fees, etc... so definitely consider the pvr-150
 
I know very little about tv tuners so I'm certainly no expert. Having said that, from what I understand you want a card with an onboard mpeg encoder to minimize the impact on your system while recording. The experience I do have has all been with software encoders (vivo v-cards) and they leave the system pretty tapped while watching/recording/timeshifting. Any real multitasking will result in dropped frames from the capture. After poking around on newegg, it looks like hardware based cards start around $55 so if you can scrape up another $10-$20 you'd be far better off imo.

What im uncertain about is if MCE compatible cards will work under XP... just have not done the research yet :)
 
I've been shopping for parts for my HTPC and the PVR-150 is on my list to capture SDTV.
 
The 150 has an ENCODER which will encode without the CPU or very little. To watch you will be DECODING which will be all CPU based.
 
Theres not a whole lot..
Go to ebay and search for "Tv Tuner Card".. Sort by "buy it now" and "price cheapest first" and pick one..

They are all pretty much the same at that price range...
 
What exactly makes the difference in quality? Say a person who doesn't watch a lot of tv and just has basic cable to watch pbs or whatever occasionally wanted to watch a few programs on a 2405FPW. What does the Hauppage provide over the cheapies?
 
peacetilence said:
What exactly makes the difference in quality? Say a person who doesn't watch a lot of tv and just has basic cable to watch pbs or whatever occasionally wanted to watch a few programs on a 2405FPW. What does the Hauppage provide over the cheapies?
Click to expand...
I would say thats what AIW cards are made for (just so you know I'm not a fan of them) since you're watching TV isn't the main reason for getting the card but more of an added benefit. I choice to use a dedicated hardware encoding card for this though (but my TV watching habits are different, it's an HTPC).

The quality difference comes from the how the video is being recorded (and yeah there is a noticable difference between these softencoding cards and a hardware encoding one), all a softencoders does is digitize the signal and then it hands it over to your CPU to process and encode. Hardware based encoders have additional chips on them whos purpose is to continue after the signal is digitized and run some filters on the video before processing which helps to clean it up (this is much like what your TV does, or atleast good ones) and then the signal gets handed off to the MPEG2 encoding chip.
 
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