External TV Tuner

[BostonMike]

Anyone have experience or recommendation for an external TV tuner? Any brand or model preferences? Looking to record a few shows to my hard drive and watch. I need something with good resolution like 1080i.

 

[somethingsketchy]

I'm no expert with USB tv tuners, but any Pinnacle System or Hauppauge tuner will work for what you will need.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16815116031

Something like this will display 1080i resolutions. My only recommendation is to have a big harddrive, because some shows (depending on length) can exceed 5GB. And that is just analog (coaxial signals). I haven't noticed any differences with the supposed digital signals if the TV shows will get larger in size. A good 500GB drive will hold a lot of shows (about 100+ hours worth of TV).

Hope this helps.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Do you need analog and digital tuners or just digital. Do you need ClearQAM? Does your computer have the processing power to live encode the streams to MPEG-2 and what is your OS?

There's lots of choices out there, knowing the above can make it easier to help you.