PVR TV Tuner Card Question

[yhelothar]

I'm currently picking out parts for a HTPC. I use digital cable. Is there a card that could watch all 500+ channels of digital cable? The only ones I find that can do that cost $200+. Are there any cheap ones that cost less than $100?

 

[hawkeye81x]

I think in general most tuner cards that are priced below $100 only recieve up to 125 channels from standard cable.

 

[drag]

The american standard for Digital cable is ALL F****D UP.

It's crap.

We use ATSC stuff, but each cable company does it a bit differently. As far as I know nobody makes a digital cable-ready tv card. It's just impossible.


Most of the rest of the world, however uses a DVB standard. And it's quite easy and cheap to get digital cable in most places in europe.

Stuff like this irritates me.

The current work around for this is to use a IR blaster setup so that your PC can control the digital cable box that you rent from your cable company. That way it can do the PVR functions. (make the box switch channels for instance.)

In this way it makes your computer function identicly to your TV were you have the digital set top box running thru the TV tuner inside the TV set and you control it thru the inferred remote control.

To me this is unacceptable. I don't have to rent my phone to get phone calls, and in most places in the world has decent standards. Seems like cable companies are purposely keeping the standards screwed up so that they can control things easier thru using propriatory boxes with those PODs or TV cards or whatever.

They aren't going to get my money. F that.

Personally I'd rather get one of those big redneck 8-foot style satalitte dishes in my back yard.

You get much better picture quality anyways, even though it's analog. Plus it's free to pick up most broadcasts, and you can pick up the wild direct feeds from special events like big football games that the cable companies use. And if you want movy channels then you can buy subscriptions to people HBO and use a descrambler box.

 

[drag]

Also be sure to check out something like the "WinTV PVR 350".

It's winTv's premeir tuner card designed specificly for PVR people.

The combination of a Mpeg2 encoder AND decoder takes a HUGE burden off of your computer's CPU time.

Plus it has a fm-tuner and all sorts of nice inputs and output.s

Using something like the IR blaster you could do something like this:

Hook a nice intenna for TV broadcasts for local networks and news. Use IR blaster to control the set top box and feed that thru the S-video input for the highest quality, and then use another antenna for FM radio..

Using the mpeg encoders and decoders you don't have to spend a fortune on fast CPU's to control everything, but a 10000 RPM setup or a RAID setup would be a very good thing. SCSI would be ideal for the smoothest possible setup. But IDE would be best for the massive storage space you'll need for all those recorded shows and movies.

The card itself costs 174 dollars at newegg, pluss they have a PVR 250 model
Now I don't know what software you can use for Windows to do the PVR stuff, especially with the IR blaster stuff, but for linux you can use MythTV.


(also some cable boxes can allow controlling thru a low-speed serial port)