Looking for good cheap TV tuner card

[randym431]

I cant believe I cant find any posts from folks looking for a good pc tv tuner here (in search). I just need a cheap good tv tuner card or usb hookup that does not need its own separate audio cable to a the sound card line-in.
I want it to furnish audio thru the usb or pci, not an line-in sound card connector.
(I don?t want to tie up the sound cards line-in or aux-in)

I know ati had the tv wonder usb, but I think there are better and less expensive tuners?

 

[Peter]

The Philips 7131 and 7135 chips can do audio both ways - through a loopback cable, or as a PCI stream.
The cheapest card using it is KWorld's 7131R.

 

[nismotigerwvu]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815117603R

50 clams....sure its open box, but theres nothing you really need besides the card anyways (this is how i got mine and its been flawless)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815116633

There's a retail pvr-150

Both of these are awesome little cards and on my system the theater card produces a better picture than my TV does in my living room (filters out a lot of noise and whatnot) and the hardware encoders on them not only drop your system strain while using them, but allow you to use a lot more (much improved) software for viewing, such as yahoo's free (currently) goTV, windows media center, media portal, mythtv...ectect....but if you plan on using the card in linux go for the pvr150, the ati card doesn;t have drivers and won't anywhere in the near future

 

[Peter]

... whereas the Philips video decoder chips and their accompanying tuner chips are well supported in Linux.

On-card MPEG encoder chips are nice for slow systems (which is why they are mandatory for Windows MCE compliance). The drawback is you're nailed to the one compression method and quality they provide. Letting the system CPU do it requires a fairly quick system, but also lets you choose your codec and quality freely.