Decent TV/video capture cards?

[hypnotoad1]

One of my friends bought a new computer with a tv card and it seems pretty cool. So I'm ordering parts for my new computer from newegg tomorrow and thought it'd be nice to get one. I don't have HD-TV or anything and honestly don't see us getting it out here in the middle of nowhere anytime soon so it doesn't have to be super high quality, but I'd like it to still look good.

I probably won't use it to watch tv, so much as transfer old tapes to dvd (MST3K!) and to replace my vcr for recording stuff. As far as price, below 50 would be great, but if it meant a huge difference in quality and performance I'd go up to 100. Otherwise I'll just wait till I can afford it. The video card on my new computer will be a 7800gtx if that helps.

What do you guys suggest? Never really paid any attention to them so I have no idea what to look for in these cards.

 

[Traire]

If your going to be using this as primarily a recording device, then you absolutely want one with a hardware based mp2 encoder. Cheap tuners will rely on your CPU to do the encoding, while more expensive cards will have a dedicated chip on the tuner card to do the encoding.

There are basically two tv tuners that are really worth getting for hardware mp2 encoding.

The Hauppauge PVR, which comes in a couple different models as PVR-150 which is the basic version, PVR-150MCE which is setup primarily for use with Windows MCE, PVR-350 which will give you hardware assisted MP2 playback as well as encoding, and the PVR-500 which is basically two PVR-150's combined together on one card allowing you to watch two channells at once, picture in picture, or record one channell while watching another and so forth.

The other card worth getting for recording is one based off the ATi Theater 550 chip. I would reccomend looking at the Saphire Theater550 card. In a recent Anandtech article, side by side comparisons showed that the 550 card had just about the best picture quality out of all the different cards reviewed.

I would also reccomend looking here for general TV tuner help: http://www.tv-cards.com

I would reccomend downloading this program for wathcing and recording TV: http://www.gbpvr.com

I would reccomend looking here for help with encoding information, different/superior encoding formats, etc.: http://www.doom9.org

 

[kristersaurus]

http://www.surpluscomputers.com/store/main.aspx?p=ItemDetail&item=CRD10186I ordered this guy cause he was cheap. And i like the site. I think its software based mpeg encoding, though. I think MythTV supports it too.

 

[TGS]

If you go with a software based card, mental prepare yourself for doing nothing but capturing or you will drop frames. Especially if you have heavy filters on a mediocre source.