Lost on TV Tuners

[Ratman6161]

Hello all,

I'm thinking of building a home theater PC. I happen to have a socket 939 nForce 4 motherboard and Athlon 64X24200 CPU available along with 2 - 4 GB of DDR RAM to go with it. I realize these may not be the best choices but I'm really trying to go cheap (but good if that makes sense!) so I want to make maximum use of what I have.

So I'm thinking of using the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have along with a DVD drive I already have and slapping those existing items in a case and adding the following:

Radeon 3470 with HDMI
WD 750 Gig variable speed (5400-7200 RMP) disk drive
and a yet to be selected TV Card to make a poor man's HTPC.

I'm quite knowledgeable on the PC part of it but not so much on the TV piece.

The 3470 card I'm looking at claims HDMI but it does it through a DVI=>HDMI adapter. Is that just a kludge or does that really work OK? I'm trying to go cheap and this is only $60.00.

When it comes to TV cards, I really need help. I'm on cable TV through Charter Communications. I get digital and HD service, but its through a cable box. The TV itself should be OK - its a 60 inch Sony LCD projection TV and will do 720P or 1080i (but NOT 1080P).

So, are there any TV cards out there that will process digital and HD signals from the cable company? It would somewhat suck to have my DVR capability limited to analog/non-hd.

Are the external tuner boxes that connect to the HTPC by USB as good as having an internal card?

I'm probably going to use Vista Ultimate (already have a technet copy otherwise it would be too expensive) as the OS and whatever it built into it or comes with the TV card software wise.

Any suggestions?

 

[Fallen Kell]

Their are only 2-3 consumer level devices that can capture from digital cable/satellite in HD. One is only available if you buy the entire system from an authorized company (a cable card based device, and would require you to rent a cable card from your cable company). Others only support part of the HD channel line-up's (i.e. un-encrypted stations). Truly, the easiest would be a new product from Hauppauge, the HD-PVR, which you can connect any set-top box's component output into and it will record up to 1080i. There is a $600 card which can take an HDMI input, but even then, it may not work on all channels/systems.

Many external tuners are as good as the internals, however, many are not. The good ones are usually pretty big because they need the room to have the PCB board space to fit chips which can do the encoding on the device, and only use the USB bus to stream the final compressed output file, not stream the raw data for the CPU to then do the encoding. So if it has hardware based encoding to MPEG2, Divx, and H.264, it is a good external device. If it simply "supports" those codices and doesn't say it is a hardware encoder, then it will probably be using your CPU, which is not a good thing.


Now, for output to the TV, if your TV only has HDMI input, and doesn't have a HDMI+L/R audio connection, you will be limited in connecting the computer to the TV. There are a few video cards which have a digital audio aux input on the card, but you will need a sound card which has an internal digital audio line out, which very few have (basically the same 2 pin cable that connects from the back of your DVD-ROM drive to the audio card, but this needs to be an output from the audio card). There is also another card out there which is a video card and audio card in one, but I don't know how good it is (or remember it's name). I personally don't have this problem, since my TV has a DVI-I input with a L/R audio connector, and I just use that to connect my HTPC to the TV. I also run an audio optical out to my audio pre-processor, to get surround sound if I want (and mute the TV audio).

 

[Ratman6161]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Sounds like I need to keep doing my homework for a while.

 

[Soundmanred]

I like Lost too. Good show.