Advice on a tv tuner card

[Interitus]

I'm looking at buying a tv tuner card here soon. I don't know much about these cards as to what's good to look for and what's not. I've been perusing the net looking for a site that dumbs it down to black and white. Basically this is for those of you that know about these cards and what the advantages of some of them are.

I know this:

1) I want to spend somewhere around $50 bucks for this card whichever it may be.
2) I know the hauppauge pvr-250 is a great tv tuner card. or so everyone seems to say, but it's a lil pricey for me unless i NEED some features of it.
3) All I want to do is listen to the radio, watch tv, and maybe record an hour long show or something that I can't watch. I probably won't connect it to any kind of external devices, however being able to capture from a dvd player would be a plus. I'd like to have a remote as well but I assume most of these come with them.

I also have a small hard drive that I could use to dedicate to video recording. It's an old Maxtor 8.4gb, but it's only 5400rpm ata66. I assume it wouldn't matter much unless the size would be an issue. Again I'd like to be able to have it at least hold an hour of video (no clue about how big that might be, don't download much video. I know DVD-R's hold about 4gb so I assume this Maxtor would cut the bill)

Just looking for some advice or some testimony to a particular card. I have no idea the differences of the $50 cards to the $150 cards so work with me

Thanks in advance for the responses!

 

[Jeff7]

The PVR-250 (and 350) have something that many other TV tuners don't have - hardware MPEG2 encoding. This allows for realtime, full resolution MPEG2 encoding that won't burden the CPU. You need a really top-end CPU to encode full-res MPEG2 in realtime, like maybe 3GHz+. Otherwise, you'd need to encode at half-resolution, which will give a slightly blurrier picture, but the CPU can also handle it a lot easier.

As for your hard drive choice - my recommendations for video editing are:
Large drive
High RPM's
RAID 0 or 5

In other words, lots of space, quick transfer times, and fast access times.

But that's for a lot of editing - I record, edit, and archive a few TV shows. They're recorded at 12Mbit/s on my PVR-350, so an hour is 5.67GB. That's to minimize quality loss through editing though.

You could record at ~8Mbit/sec, and get about 2hrs on that 8.4GB hard drive.
As for a specific card, I've seen something by Leadtek recommended a lot; TV2000XP or something like that. It uses software-based encoding though. I don't know about radio on it though.

 

[Interitus]

Well all I really need it to do is record an hour long show or something. 2 hours would be a special occaision like for the Super Bowl or something to that effect. I looked at the Leadtek model you mentioned and it looked ok. I came across another one from MSI that seemed like was a good deal. MSI TV Tuner I won't really mind the software encoding as long as it can do its job. I'd mainly use it for when I was away from the computer/not watching anyways. I don't really do any editing at all, it's just not my thing.

Mainly just looking for something that can record up to an hour (2 tops) with half decent picture size and resolution, has a remote, good tv quality and FM tuner. The slow Maxtor can be replaced with something else if it's gonna cause playback issues, but I just figured I already had the thing.

This is my setup:

Thermaltake 420w PSU
A7N8X Deluxe
Barton 2500 (working on getting it to 3200 speed)
1024MB OCZ PC3200 @ 2-2-3-5
GF4 TI4600
SB Audigy Platinum
WD800JB 80GB 8MB Cache
Viewsonic 19" G90MB

 

[adams828]

i'd say so with the leadtek winfast2000 deluxe, tons of people on here have it and would reccomend it.

 

[InlineFive]

I can't help much but don't go with the MSI!!! I had two of those and both of them were absolute crap. The software took two minutes to load (on my 3200+ with a DM9+) and it couldn't recieve any cable channels. I'm thinking about the Leadtek WinFast 2000 Deluxe with DScaler.

-Por

 

[ojai00]

Originally posted by: adams828
i'd say so with the leadtek winfast2000 deluxe, tons of people on here have it and would reccomend it.

My LeadTek Winfast2000 Deluxe works fine for me and should do everything that you need it to do. I got it for $42 a couple of months ago. I think the Winfast 2000 Expert is out now but I have no idea how that compares to the Deluxe. Hope this helps.

 

[shock311]

I have the Expert card, and my neighbor has the Deluxe, they are pretty much similar except the recording in the expert is a tad better. The only dislike I have with the card is the FM antenna given works like crap in my apt.

 

[JBT]

Originally posted by: adams828
i'd say so with the leadtek winfast2000 deluxe, tons of people on here have it and would reccomend it.

I like my Deluxe card. The Radio on mine works fine just make sure u wire the antenna high and spread out.

 

[Interitus]

Sounds good guys. I'm leaning more towards the Leadtek now as well. Good price and good features.

Last part I'm worried about is that I've read that the Leadtek has trouble with integrated sound cards? I have an Audigy atm so it's not an issue now, but in case I change setup i'd like it to work with integrated sound as well.

And anyone have an opinion on that small drive? I really don't want to record onto my main drive all the time, I'd rather use the little one. Just worried about the slow speed causing poor playback (ata66 5400rpm)

Thank you for all your responses

 

[JBT]

I use my on board sound storm just fine with my Leadtek. If you get that card make sure u download the latest drivers from leadteks site not the ones on the CD.

 

[Interitus]

Thanks for the tip and good to hear it works with soundstorm

 

[ponyo]

Works fine w/ my soundstorm also. I really like my Leadtek. I get excellent reception connected to cable tv and FM radio works great too down in my basement. I have it programmed to record couple of shows a week and it does excellent job. It's one of my favorite computer part purchases.

As for the small drive, it will probably work out fine. Good luck w/ whichever card you get.