Best USB TV Tuner

You need to give a little more information. What is your source for TV (OTA, cable, satellite)? Do you need access to HD premium channels? What is your OS? What program do you want to use tune/record? Do you need the ability to record more than one show at a time, or record and watch simultaneously?

That said, depending on the answers to the above questions, it may rule out a USB tuner, which you probably don't want to hear. But maybe not...
 
USB is the only option.

ota, no premium channels, windows 7, WMC, maybe but not a big deal.

this help?? :D
 
Well, there are different standards, clearQAM, ATSC, NTSC, cablecards... since you are only using over the air, this tells us all you need is an ATSC tuner, and nothing else. So this does help us narrow down the type of tuner you want.

I personally don't have experience with USB tuners, so I don't think I'll be recommending something for you. Is an ethernet based tuner acceptable, or only USB?
 
The silicondust ethernet dual hdtv tuner is the best device ive used. Its not usb, but it is external if thats what your requirement really is.
 
Thanks for the replies so far.

An ethernet TV adapter?? I assume you mean the HDHomeRun?

I assume if connected to a switch this device could also stream over wireless then? I see it uses WMC which is a plus.

Any idea about local system resources? Would this device offload anything from the CPU of the device its streaming to. I would assume it does. Which again is a plus. This is going on an Acer Revo nettop. It plays 720p video pretty well.

HDHomeRun for local OTA channels, Netflix, Hulu, and I'm on my way to saying goodbye to cable television!
 
kkeirnan said:
HDHomeRun for local OTA channels, Netflix, Hulu, and I'm on my way to saying goodbye to cable television!
Click to expand...

thats the same thing I jsut did.. Except I am using sagetv instead of WMC since I needed to expand to 4 TV's & the sage extenders are cheaper then 360's
 
So my setup is as follows:

2 of the dual tuner HDHomeruns. Each tuner has a seperate antenna connection. I have one hooked up to a vhf antenna for channel 6. The other 3 into a uhf antenna.

This is hooked up via wired ethernet to my network, which my pc is on.
I dont know how well wireless would work, hdtv is roughly 20mbit per tuner.

I have windows 7 media center setup, and season recordings scheduled, but i dont watch anything on the pc.

I have an xbox360 also on gigabit, that i use its built in media center extender capability to do all my viewing on. (even for ch6 live tv).

The hd homerun is designed to be setup for use with one pc, it has various settings in the drivers to tell it how things should be setup, and what software it should support.
 
SirMaster said:
I use this tuner on my PC and with Media Center:
http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr950q.html

It has worked great. Doesn't overheat with hours of use or drop out or anything.

I believe you can just get the 850 for just ATSC but I wanted the ability to tune ClearQAM as well.

Higher-end would be the 1950.

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/prods_hvr_external.html
Click to expand...

I have an 850, but stopped using it because it would get "lost" by the usb drivers after a couple weeks and have to be reinstalled.

Maybe they have fixed their drivers since i tried to use it though(several years ago)
 
They probably re-wrote the drivers for Win7 and fixed problems.

I haven't had a single issue in the 5 months I've been using it on my Win 7 x64.
 
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