Ceton InfiniTV 4 Quad-tuner Card $219 @ Newegg

[dclive]

Reccomended is a 2.7ghz C2D IIRC. It doesn't need a terrible lot of power to record, but if your video card doesn't support the right codec in hardware on playback you might need that.

If you even care about playback, locally.

It all depends on what you're looking for, but when a $90 AppleTV, $160 Boxee Box, and $50 PBO all have more than enough hardware, I'd be pretty surprised if even older machines couldn't muster up enough to do a single playback at one time.

The best use, to me, for a media center box is in the closet - with PBOs, AppleTV2s, or similar hooked up to each TV. I don't want to deal with the noise of a PC in the living room.

 

[dclive]

I know when I have all 4 tuners recording and its starting or finalizing a recording I see occasional stutters in the interface. If you have a separate physical disk for OS and media you might be okay. I read about one guy who recorded 13 HD streams and played back 4 at the same time on a regular HDD and it worked though.

Stutters with what hardware setup? I have a virtualized setup with 2 vCPUs (i7/3.06), 4GB vRAM, and a RAID5 stripe of about 500GB. No issues with 2 HDHRs (4 tuners) going at once, although I'm rarely around to watch TV at that time too. My decommercializing and WTV to DVR-MS conversions happen at different times, too.

 

[thedarkwolf]

I'm using an older core 2 duo e6300 and recording two digital and one analog show using software conversion runs my cpu between 30-60%. The digital tuners use almost no cpu power to record.

One other advantage of using windows media center is it is smarter than my comcast cable box. If I asked the comcast DVR to record 3 shows at the same time it would just say no. If I have too many shows scheduled to record at the sametime using WMC it will look through the guide to see if one of the shows is being shown at a later date and record it then.

 

[dclive]

I'm using an older core 2 duo e6300 and recording two digital and one analog show using software conversion runs my cpu between 30-60%. The digital tuners use almost no cpu power to record.

One other advantage of using windows media center is it is smarter than my comcast cable box. If I asked the comcast DVR to record 3 shows at the same time it would just say no. If I have too many shows scheduled to record at the sametime using WMC it will look through the guide to see if one of the shows is being shown at a later date and record it then.

I didn't realize you were doing analog recording. Is that with a card with built-in compression, or is your computer handling compression? That alone (CPU handling compression) would use quite a bit of the power of a single core. Analog is pretty inefficient; digital is simply writing the bits to a hard drive with essentially no additional work.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

I didn't realize you were doing analog recording. Is that with a card with built-in compression, or is your computer handling compression? That alone (CPU handling compression) would use quite a bit of the power of a single core. Analog is pretty inefficient; digital is simply writing the bits to a hard drive with essentially no additional work.

I am also curious -- what special steps (if any) are required to record analog?

 

[dclive]

Nothing. It's just that if you have an (analog) tuner that doesn't compress the signal for you (hardware compression tuner) than the CPU has to do it - and that will put a big load on the CPU.

If you have digital or an analog tuner that handles hardware compression, there's almost no load, and pretty much any CPU can handle lots and lots of streams.

 

[thedarkwolf]

I didn't realize you were doing analog recording. Is that with a card with built-in compression, or is your computer handling compression? That alone (CPU handling compression) would use quite a bit of the power of a single core. Analog is pretty inefficient; digital is simply writing the bits to a hard drive with essentially no additional work.

Comcast in my area still shows basic cable channels 1-74 in analog only. The cable card tuner is digital only so I bought an analog tuner to cover those. I cheaped out and just bought one that does the encoding in software.

 

[dclive]

A HDHR (digital only) can get QAM basic cable channels in digital format. I thought everyone had to send cable signal in digital format now. Are some small markets excluded?

 

[JeffMD]

Do you live by yourself? If you live in a house with a family, particularly with divergent tastes you can easily go through 2 tuners. I've run into issues with 4 on sunday nights at times trying to pick up all the weekly prime time shows at once.

Haha..I stand corrected. Back in the day when all 4 of us needed cable boxs in our rooms (well before dvr existed), I could see us knocking together on the evening shows and movies.

As per the above post... if you went with a real budget tuner you could be stuck with one using software based mpeg2 compression, but if you were at all serious with having a DVR box and multiple tuners then you would get one with hardware based compression.

 

[thedarkwolf]

Haha..I stand corrected. Back in the day when all 4 of us needed cable boxs in our rooms (well before dvr existed), I could see us knocking together on the evening shows and movies.

As per the above post... if you went with a real budget tuner you could be stuck with one using software based mpeg2 compression, but if you were at all serious with having a DVR box and multiple tuners then you would get one with hardware based compression.

I already said my 1 analog tuner is software compression and it is fine. I don't watch or record basic cable crap that often and when I do my CPU is plenty to handle it. My dual tuner cable card tuner sees 90% of my recording and tv watching.

 

[Midwayman]

Stutters with what hardware setup? I have a virtualized setup with 2 vCPUs (i7/3.06), 4GB vRAM, and a RAID5 stripe of about 500GB. No issues with 2 HDHRs (4 tuners) going at once, although I'm rarely around to watch TV at that time too. My decommercializing and WTV to DVR-MS conversions happen at different times, too.

My box is pretty modest
e8400 cpu
4gb ram
single 2tb HDD, samsung spinspoint f4 IIRC
ati 5450

Its only really on finalizing a recording with 4x stream and playback that I see anything. Not a big deal. I got far worse on my cable co dvr.

 

[bradley]

Does anyone know what this card version draws at standby and full load?

Apparently the USB version draws 10W at idle.

http://www.missingremote.com/review/ceton-infinitv-4-usb-cablecard-tuner

"Power use was higher than expected with the device pulling 10.2 watts (W) even with no tuners active. Consumption ramped from there to a peak of 11.6W when fully taxed. While there is a small reduction in draw (0.2W) when the PC is in standby, it still pulls ~10W in that state so there is significant room for improvement. After viewing the power numbers, it comes as no surprise that the InfiniTV 4 USB gets warm. Ranging from ~43°C to a 51.8°C (125°F) peak temperature measured during one of the stress tests, leaving the device somewhat uncomfortable to touch. I was assured that anything less than 65°C is normal, and given the stability exhibited even in that condition it is safe to take Ceton at their word."

 

[mikeford]

A HDHR (digital only) can get QAM basic cable channels in digital format. I thought everyone had to send cable signal in digital format now. Are some small markets excluded?

Over the air is all digital, cable signals have more flexibility in delivery format.

 

[wirednuts]

Does anyone know what this card version draws at standby and full load?

Apparently the USB version draws 10W at idle.

http://www.missingremote.com/review/ceton-infinitv-4-usb-cablecard-tuner

that sucks. literally. what the hell is it dumping 10watts into constantly thats ending in no result besides heat obviously?

 

[wirednuts]

or does each tuner actually use about 1/2 of a watt and the 10w at standby is from the pos wall wart the usb version comes with?

 

[the DRIZZLE]

that sucks. literally. what the hell is it dumping 10watts into constantly thats ending in no result besides heat obviously?

You realize that 10w running 24/7 is like $1/month of electricity right?

 

[Schmide]

I have the Hauppauge WinTV-DCR-2650 which has 2 tuners. I decided to check it out with my Killawatt. It consumes 7.5w idle, 8.5w with 1 or 2 tuners active.