PCMCIA or USB TV tuner

[PoopyPants]

ok fellas so im gunna take my laptop up a notch and go for either a pcmcia or usb TV Tuner but i really cant tell which is best.
so many have the same feature or total crap chipset that only allows for mediocre recording or watching.

i was looking at one of the pcmcia card w/ the Philips 7134 chipset in it. doesnt look like it really does more but quality might be better but i don't know everyone claims their card is best.

can some people who have either chime in and offer me their thoughts on what card or usb device i should purchase.

thanks in advance all!

P.

 

[Peter]

I'll have PCMCIA (and actually, I do). You'll get the original, not MPEGized, stream at least when you're viewing live, and you may choose your format and quality when recording. USB boxes can only feed a pre-MPEGized stream into the machine, simply because USB bandwidth limitations don't let it do raw.

You want the Philips chip indeed, combined with a "universal" tuner and maybe DVB-T when you're travelling to areas that have it.

LifeView's cards are technically good and come with all the extras (although some have a fan inside that might be annoying to you, depending on how loud your laptop is anyway); currently I'm using an AverMedia card which does well too.

 

[PoopyPants]

thanks peter thats the type of feedback i need.
so AverMedia i'll look for some of their better cards.

would you happen to have alink to the card that you use ?

i rather disagree on your statement of USB's bandwidth limitations.
usb is more than enough bandwidth to stream standard and HD content thru it so...

also you say its sending a pre-mpeg-ized signal. ok well thats what a pcmcia card is pushing into the system. a raw unmpeg version of the video. it is then up to the decoding software to decode the signal its given into a good looking picture, and same for encoding, its up to the software you chose to encode the video into something that is of a quality that is up to your liking.

unless i am misunderstanding what you mean for the usb type tuner.
for me i wold think both devices are doing the exact same thing, only one is fed into pcmcia and the other into usb.

lastly i would say pcmcia is slower than usb 2.0 but i know i must be wrong since pcmcia is a sort of direct link to the motherboard. which technically would be much much faster, but i am only speculating.

 

[Peter]

What the USB card feeds into the system is already MPEGized. From a PCMCIA videograbber, you get the raw, uncompressed stream in realtime.

USB 2.0, in real life, once you look past marketing numbers, is a lot slower than the current (32-bit) flavor of PCMCIA ("Cardbus"), about three to four times. Also, USB produces high CPU load, and sucks quite badly at handling inbound isochronous traffic. PCI (Cardbus) videograbbers can push directly into the graphics card's overlay buffer, with zero (yes zero) CPU load and zero frames of latency. (The graphics card may add one or two for deinterlacing and scaling.)

 

[Peter]

Links ... www.avermedia.com.tw www.lifeview.com.tw - I've been using the "AverMedia Cardbus Hybrid 506R" and "LifeView FlyDVB-T Duo Cardbus LR502" cards.

 

[PoopyPants]

thanks man ill look into those items.

and yes over sustained speeds usb slows down, but not enough to limit the minor bandwdth that standard cable or video in would require.
lets say if i wanted ot record some xbox video or something like that ya know. using standard svideo or rca its still a low 640x480 resolution which doesnt eat up much.

but i understand what you mean. cardbus is definately the way to go i agree.

is this the Avermedia Card ? Clicky Clicky

and you must be in the UK ? those two cards seem to be being sold out of the UK and Australia. Although they handle NTSC i'll have to look around and find me a usa vendor cheap..

mostly all i want is the ocassional tv show but mostly is recording video from consoles.

 

[Peter]

Wake up and smell the coffee. Standard resolution TV, 640x480 pixels, 30 frames per second, is a LOT of data, 9.2 million pixels per second, all to be delivered jitter free and in time.

Yes, that linked card is the one I currently have.

I'm in Germany btw.

 

[PoopyPants]

well if i can stream a dvd from my usb hard drive and pull data back and forth at the same time the only way a usb tv tuner is going to bog it down is if its an HD Tuner pulling an HD signal
or if its a reallly poorly coded video and its just a huge data stream

know what i mean but yes i agree cardbus is the way i was just trying to not have that huge thing sticking out the side of my lappy and have all the heat right there next to the vide chipset of the lappy