Poll: Who makes the best TV tuner cards?

[Chadder007]

I wish someone would do a big comparison between all of them. Showing the quality of captures between them and features and stuff. I hear the conexant 10bit chips are the best now though but im not sure.

 

[Jeff7]

Hauppauge has good hardware, but lousy drivers. Or maybe the word lousy doesn't do them justice. Maybe "Alpha drivers packaged as final versions" is more accurate.
I think they put a good bit of money into their hardware development - they do MPEG2 encoding in the hardware, which greatly reduces the CPU load. You can encode full-screen MPEG2 at high bitrates with very low CPU usage. Their PVR-PCI was excellently designed with one problem - they dropped driver development of it completely.

It displayed live TV in said mode; when doing timeshifting, it showed an MPEG stream in the video window.
The newer, and still "supported" PVR-250 and 350 do things differently - they ALWAYS display an MPEG stream. Now the PVR-350 does have hardware MPEG2 decoding, however it is only active through the S-video output port, which I think was a bit of a dumb thing on their part. But otherwise, the PVR-350 is an excellent piece of hardware - it seems like advanced technology for a consumer-level card.
If they could produce decent, stable drivers, I would not hesitate to recommend this card. Whether that helps or not...up to you. Check the link in my sig for the PVR forum to get an idea of the problems with the drivers.

 

[bigpow]

ASUS

(of course I'm biased)

 

[HiTek21]

I've had 3 TV Cards in the past few years. ATi TV Wonder, Leadtek Winfast 2000XP Deluxe, And currently am using the Asus TVFM7133. The Asus card definatly has better quality images than the ATi And Leadtek card but the software kinda sucks. It takes a while for it to load up and change channels and is kind of confusing.
The Leadtek has good quality images and very easy to use software and is a good value for under 50 bucks.
The ATi card was a joke, the image quality was decent but not great and I couldn't get the recording software to work on my computer. This was the ATi TV Wonder Retail not VE edition.

 

[Aganack1]

I've heard good things about the Compro VideoMate TV Gold Plus PCI TV Tuner Card, anyone here used this one?

 

[substance12]

i have an ati 9500 already. is it possible to add, say a leadtek 2000 to my motherboard and run dual monitors... 1 from the ati, and 1 from the leadtek?

 

[fell8]

Originally posted by: MangoTBG

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
hdtv cards is wheres its at though.

Sounds expensive. Link?

Link.

 

[Vernor]

So if you have digital cable or sat, do you just get a cheap capture card with no tuner ?

 

[fell8]

Originally posted by: Vernor
So if you have digital cable or sat, do you just get a cheap capture card with no tuner ?

Yup, digital sat/cable use propreitary encoding that regular tuners can't decode. Just hook the video out from the box to the video in on the card. (I suppose if you want sound, you could hook that up also)

 

[BaboonGuy]

Originally posted by: substance12
i have an ati 9500 already. is it possible to add, say a leadtek 2000 to my motherboard and run dual monitors... 1 from the ati, and 1 from the leadtek?

you should be able to run dual monitors from the 9500 alone, unless you want dual dvi.