Cheap TV card - which is the best? Conexant 87x or Philips saa713x based?

[vss1980]

Hello all.

A friend of mine wants to watch TV on his computer. It's nothing special (P3 500MHz) and he won't be needing or even thinking of HDTV, etc. so doesn't need a card that is anything special.

At the moment (compared with years ago) TV cards are going pretty cheap ($30 say) and those cheap ones boast better hardware and features than those that sold for hundreds quite a few years back, so as far as he's concerned for standard good old analogue TV things are about as good as its gonna get for the money.

Anyway, he'll only be using it for normal analogue TV viewing via the aerial and also using a composite input from a set-top box. At the moment, king of the budget cards seems to be either the Conexant 87x or Philips 713x based cards.

Which of these is best? Both are used on the cheap end and evenly priced. Which has the best driver support / works best (software wise), and of course has the best picture quality??

One other thing is that all the Philips based cards I've seen reckon they need a more meaty CPU than the Conexant based ones as minimum specs? Do the Philips cards offload more work onto the CPU than the Conexant cards?

Cheers for any info.

 

[Peter]

The Conexant 878/878A/879 is about the oldest framegrabber chip out there. It produces comparably low contrast and gamut, the Philips 713x series chips as well as Conexant's current 2388x chips are very noticeably better at this.

CPU load for realtime viewing can be as low as zero - PCI TV cards can push the stream straight into the graphics card's overlay buffer, and let the graphics engine deinterlace, scale and insert it into the main display. Beyond that, none of the cheap PCI cards provides anything that would assist the CPU in the remaining tasks like MPEG2-izing the stream for recording or advanced multi-frame deinterlacers.

From what I've seen and used, I'd go with a Philips chip - and make sure it's paired with the latest Philips "silicon tuner" technology. You recognize that from the absence of the typical "tin can" shielded area.

 

[vss1980]

Originally posted by: Peter
CPU load for realtime viewing can be as low as zero - PCI TV cards can push the stream straight into the graphics card's overlay buffer, and let the graphics engine deinterlace, scale and insert it into the main display. Beyond that, none of the cheap PCI cards provides anything that would assist the CPU in the remaining tasks like MPEG2-izing the stream for recording or advanced multi-frame deinterlacers.

From what I've seen and used, I'd go with a Philips chip - and make sure it's paired with the latest Philips "silicon tuner" technology. You recognize that from the absence of the typical "tin can" shielded area.

I thought that would be the case as far as viewing goes - I know that recording and encoding will completely shift the CPU requirements - however the steeper requirements listed for one card compared to others kinda bugged me, after all look at how modems went to 'winmodems'.....

Unfortunately most (if not all) cheap cards are the 'tin can' types - although that isn't too much of a problem really. I agree with the comments about picture contrast/colour observations about the 878 based cards (I've got one) but the picture quality is still pretty good from the old 'tin can'.

I have one other question - a few sites/people reckon there are problems with the philips 713x and XP SP2 or at least the software that comes with some of the cards. Problem or not??

 

[Peter]

The KWorld 7131 card offered at Newegg is of the modern type, and with $30, isn't exactly expensive.

The tuner thing isn't so much about tuning quality (although the silicon tuner is very good at making something from weak reception), but about universality. Tin can tuners are always single-norm.

 

[vss1980]

Unfortunately what is available in the US cheap isn't as cheap here in the UK. Although am still looking to see what is around.

Single-norm??

 

[Steve]

Single-norm = PAL only, or NTSC only, etc...

 

[orangat]

Originally posted by: Peter
The KWorld 7131 card offered at Newegg is of the modern type, and with $30, isn't exactly expensive.

The tuner thing isn't so much about tuning quality (although the silicon tuner is very good at making something from weak reception), but about universality. Tin can tuners are always single-norm.

Have you installed a Kworld 7131? How does the software and image quality compare to the popular Leadtek Delux/Expert model?

 

[vss1980]

Cool, cheers for the info guys. Managed to find the one your on about for a reasonable price (a bit more than $30 but cheap enough). I have also found a few silicon tuners that still have a tin can covering them (albeit a tiny little square-ish one - noticably different to the old long/large old tuners) obviously for that little bit extra shielding.