Any TV Tuners that don't suck?

[lozina]

I wanted to record something off TV recently so my brother can watch it when he came back from vacation and I brought up my WinFast 2000 XP tv tuner for the job. It did fine when just viewing the picture on my computer but as soon as I clicked record the picture started to get occassional white lines going accross the screen horizontally. It looked exactly as if the cable was a bit loose but it certainly wasn't, and I tried several cables, and the picture looks fine if I'm not recording.

The whole video wound up having these video artifacts and while it's not bad enough that I can't watch it it's just so annoying to not have perfectly clear picture. Now I'm wondering if there's a TV Tuner out there that won't let me down like this.

I suppose it's possible my computer was not fast enough to record the video and so it produced those artifacts but I have a pretty fast machine so I'm kinda doubting that possibility

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ASUS A8N-SLI
3 Gigs RAM
recorded on a 36 Gig Seagate Cheetah X15 drive

 

[Crono]

You sure they aren't scan lines from interlaced video? Because you will usually get some lines unless you use a filter like DScaler. If it's that bad, try different PVR software like SageTv or Cyberlink.

 

[jevans64]

Some of those artifacts might be from interlacing and is usually seen in areas where movement is taking place. Here is an example at 100fps dot com. It talks about DEinterlacing but the first three pictures are good examples if interlaced video.

http://www.100fps.com/

If this is what you are seeing, roughly 2 frames out of every five, then this is normal for captured video without the proper deinterlace filters ( DScaler, etc. ) in place.

Another thing to look at is CPU usage when you are recording and viewing the playback window. Take a look at CPU usage ( Windows XP ) by right-clicking on the task bar and selecting Task Manager. Click in the Performance tab. If your CPU Usage is greater than 50%, then your capture card IS NOT using hardware to encode the video. A decent tuner that uses hardware for encoding will consume 5 to 15% of the CPU when recording.

There are very few that use hardware and these run in the neighborhood of $140. The two that I can think of now are the ATI Theater 550 pro and the Hauppauge WinTV PVR150/250/350/500 series. I have a Hauppauge PVR 350 and the only issue for me is a problem with HyperThreading. This would not be a factor for you since you have an A64.

There is certainly nothing wrong with your components. If the CPU usage is not a problem, I would look at the software side ( decoder software and codecs ) for the answer.

 

[lozina]

Thanks for your replies!

I looked over those examples of interlaced video and my problem does not look like that. The example on that site is very uniform, like a pattern. The thing I get is random, like one or more thin garbled lines that appears accross the screen very briefly then disappears. It will happen every few seconds or sometimes on some occassions in more rapid bursts.

 

[danklumpp]

I've heard some great things about the EVGA TV Tuner if you wanted to try another one... can't go wrong with EVGA

 

[Bateluer]

AT took a look at several TV tuners a while back, might be worth looking looking at. I think all TV Tuners have their little quirks though, no matter what you do or which one you buy.

 

[JRW]

I've had semi thick horizontal white lines appear when trying to capture from a retail DVD or VHS, This was due to macrovision protection..but you say you're recording from TV so not sure whats going on..

 

[Keysplayr]

Hauppauge PVR150.

 

[alpineranger]

ATI TV Wonder Elite - great quality but quirky software that doesn't like standard file formats (at least the last time I checked). Also, really new with scarce technical documentation, so I don't think it's supported by the foss community unlike the happauge cards.

Edit: Forgot to mention, if you can get over the caveats, the tv wonder elite has the cleanest, sharpest picture from a plain old analog (over the air / cable) signal I've ever seen.

 

[dug777]

my DVICO Fusionlite (theDVB-T one) is excellent, DXVA decode is done on my 9800 pro so the CPU usage is minimal, even with 1080i, and plugged into the roof antenna my signal is excellent, pic quility is flawless

 

[Tu13erhead]

Originally posted by: alpineranger
the tv wonder elite has the cleanest, sharpest picture from a plain old analog (over the air / cable) signal I've ever seen.

Tempting...

 

[Titan]

I've heard the PVR-250 is good and the PVR-350 is where it's at. Hardware MPEG2 encoder, and there is good support for it in linux using MythTV which can automatically edit commercials out for you.

 

[ITPaladin]

It's funny how the MPAA threatens BT TV show sites when you can use commercially available hardware/software to cut out commercials from tv shows you have DOWNLOADED.

 

[jevans64]

Originally posted by: tkotitan2
I've heard the PVR-250 is good and the PVR-350 is where it's at. Hardware MPEG2 encoder, and there is good support for it in linux using MythTV which can automatically edit commercials out for you.

Actually. The PVR150 has the most recent hardware on it and is identical to the 250 in functionality except the video input features. The 350 adds the ability to decode FM radio stations. They ALL have hardware MPEG2 encoders. There MIGHT be differences in the software included but it does not look like it by looking at the specs. The 150 is fine if you only plan to capture video and NOT use it to capture video from a VCR or something. The 350 has a different remote and has a different set of input cables.

I purchased my PVR350 / SageTV bundle from here.

http://www.pcalchemy.com/index.php

 

[imported_g33k]

I myself will be buying an ATi TV Wonder Elite. Both AT and techreport gave the nod to the ATi over their competitors, including the happuage 150 and 250.