Is Hauppauge 1800 agreed as a good card?

[konceptz]

Thanks in advance for the reply.


I am slowly but surely re-rigging my system to be able to HTPC with but for the life of me I can't decide on a good card.

I live in a basement of my apt. building in a smaller city, I've been told there are 10+ OTA HD stations, but I plan to use cable.

I will probably be using digital cable only, but would like the option to upgrade to HD through cable sometime in the next year.

I would like to PVR and watch tv at the same time, FM would be nice but isn't needed.

I also use Media center through Windows Vista Ultimate 32, but plan on upgrading to 64 if the stars align...

Wow, I sound needy, but if you have any suggestions on a good card for my needs it would cut through a lot of head bashing time spent on the greenbutton forums.

Thanks again.

edit: I'll be using a 1080p 32" monitor with a 22" LCD as backup. I have a kind of "command center" setup that sometimes is used to entertain guests.

 

[tenax]

i have the 1800 as of 2 weeks ago. no hd access in my neck of the woods in canada yet so i can't speak to that, but for analog cable or settop box connection, works just fine. i also have 2 pci slot pvr 150s to compare it to in my system and very comparable card for pq, audio etc. and i've had no problems with it. nice to free up a pci slot as well

 

[XMan]

As long as the drivers are well-written, it's hard to see a difference between any of the HDTV tuner cards. After all, they're just capturing a digital signal. There's no hardware encoding or decoding required. Big diff from analog capture cards, where there can be huge differences in picture quality between different brands of cards. In your case I don't know that it will apply, as you'll have to use the analog portion of the card from your digital cable box. No cable cards for MCE unless you buy a prebuilt system.

Hauppauge makes great stuff. If you're looking for HD you can't go wrong with them, and the price is reasonable. Have you thought about getting a card that supports QAM? The HDHomeRun does it in Media Center, and you'll be able to get your local HD channels over your cable line right now; the company is required to put them there unencrypted.

 

[tenax]

i agree with your assessment of hauppauge..they used to have tricky drivers with the middleware and such, but they've become quite easy to install now.