looking for a cheap tv-tuner card

[trOver]

25-50 bucks, used for standard definition. PCI interface preferred. Also- what brands are the best?

 

[Dainas]

Lifeview far and away wins in picture quality(phillips decoder) and driver stability for under $60, All the major namebrands use garbage conexant chips on their sub $80 tvtuners.

Also all ATI tvtuners under the TvWonder 550($70~) have junk picture quality. The softwear makes the most nightmarish spywear seem like a breeze to uninstall.

 

[deadken]

Leadtek TV2000XP far and away blows other like priced cards in picture quality (10bit) and software. The FM tuner is just the icing on the cake.

I replace a Hapauge Win TV-Go tuner in my sons PC and I was so unhappy with the quality, I had to get this instead. Hands down, you can't touch this card for the price.
BTW: I have used: ATI TV Wonder Pro, ATI HDTV Wonder, Happauge Win TV-Go and this Leadtek TV2000XP.

I am seriously looking at the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1600, but that is out of your price range by quite a bit.

 

[Dainas]

10-bit or not, try running a Phillips based TVtuner before you make such claims(pretty much all have FM tuners too). The only tuner that you listed with decent quality was the HDwonder(the TV-go and TV-wonder are all pretty low tuners to compare quality to).

Still though the Leadtek TV2000XP looks alot better than all the low-end hauppauge/ati crap.

 

[Peter]

The current (23xxx series) Conexant chips are on par with the Philips 713x series as far as capture quality goes. My money is on Philips because the chip is much simpler to handle from a driver perspective. The ones to avoid are the old Conexant/Brooktree Bt878.

LifeView's current cards don't skimp on analog filtering and buffering, and thus don't show self-inducted digital noise as some of the others (and even some of their older designs) do.

They're a bit hard to get under their own brand, but there are plenty of badge job "brands" out there that actually use LifeView boards.

 

[PorscheMaD911]

I like my Compro Videomate T-200.

 

[dug777]

FWIW i loved my DVICO HDTV card (DVB-T not whatever your HDTV is). HDTV IQ was razor sharp, crisp, the drivers worked out of the box and were regularly updated, the remote worked with other apps too, and the DXVA decode was handy with an older CPU (2.1Ghz tbred-b) for 1080i stuff and playing it back.


Still got some awesome CSI captures on my HDD, man they look good Of course, i think the card used a conexant chip, so according to the experts in this thread, everything must have looked utterly crap EDIT: (It seems that this is only the case for analog TV, my bad )

 

[Peter]

(Digital) HDTV cannot have image quality issues introduced by the TV card, since it is just a passthrough device for digital image data, not an analog signal encoder.

Likewise, digital-TV cards do not have "hardware encoding" - the incoming data stream is already encoded, only passing through.

Finally, OUTPUT acceleration is of course done by your graphics card, not by the TV card.

 

[dug777]

Originally posted by: Peter
(Digital) HDTV cannot have image quality issues introduced by the TV card, since it is just a passthrough device for digital image data, not an analog signal encoder.

Likewise, digital-TV cards do not have "hardware encoding" - the incoming data stream is already encoded, only passing through.

Finally, OUTPUT acceleration is of course done by your graphics card, not by the TV card.

Aha, i get ya

On the output acceleration, my card had the option of DXVA decode or non-DXVA decode, and there was a massive jump in CPU usage if i selected the non-DXVA option. If that makes sense.

 

[Peter]

DXVA or not is a choice the card's _application_ software gives you, and it's for the output end of the business. The actual capturing of the TV data stream does not have any parameters at all if it's a digital signal - it is what it is, all the TV card does is tune to the channel, extract the data, and pass them through PCI into RAM for the application software to work with.