HD Tuner

[citan x]

Anybody know of a good HD tuner to put on my PC? I am looking for a PCI, USB, Firewire, or e-sata one. I want one that will work with XP Pro and Vista Business. I don't have MCE. I would also like one that is capable of working with H264. Also, one that is easy to setup would be good.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: citan x
Anybody know of a good HD tuner to put on my PC? I am looking for a PCI, USB, Firewire, or e-sata one. I want one that will work with XP Pro and Vista Business. I don't have MCE. I would also like one that is capable of working with H264. Also, one that is easy to setup would be good.

When you say HD, do you mean OTA? As long as you're not dealing with anything encrypted, the HDHomeRun is probably the best way to go. It's essentially platform agnostic and easy to setup. H.264 though is a different matter, since the North American HD standards all use MPEG2; in theory the device can handle H.264 streams, but no one uses them.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: ViRGE

Originally posted by: citan x
Anybody know of a good HD tuner to put on my PC? I am looking for a PCI, USB, Firewire, or e-sata one. I want one that will work with XP Pro and Vista Business. I don't have MCE. I would also like one that is capable of working with H264. Also, one that is easy to setup would be good.

When you say HD, do you mean OTA? As long as you're not dealing with anything encrypted, the HDHomeRun is probably the best way to go. It's essentially platform agnostic and easy to setup. H.264 though is a different matter, since the North American HD standards all use MPEG2; in theory the device can handle H.264 streams, but no one uses them.

Note, according to the specs the HDHomeRun also does Clear QAM channels as well. This is a fascinating product, never seen anything like it, it's like the NAS of TV Tuners. The only better thing is if it did standalone recording and had it's own storage, and supported CableCard, but then I suppose it would be a TiVo.

 

[citan x]

Yes, I meant OTA. By H264, I meant a h264 encoder to encode the content instead of MPEG2, but I don't really thing such a thing exists, and if it does it would be way to expensive.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: citan x
Yes, I meant OTA. By H264, I meant a h264 encoder to encode the content instead of MPEG2, but I don't really thing such a thing exists, and if it does it would be way to expensive.

The only thing like that is the Hauppauge HD PVR, which is meant for digitizing the analog output of cable/sat boxes. I'm not sure why you'd want to real-time transcode an already digital MPEG2 signal though, it's not as if MPEG2 is hard to handle. If you need to archive something, you can transcode it later at a better quality since it doesn't have to be real-time.