TV Tuner Card

[villageidiot111]

So, I am considering buying a basic tuner card, and there are some things I just don't know about them.

I have digital cable. Some channels are digital, some aren't. Will this card be able view all channels, or just the non-digital ones?

How do the tuners get the sound to the computer? Is there a cable (internal or external) that hooks up, or can I just stick the card in and it will work?

Do most tuners come with software, or is that something I will have to invest in?

Can you recommend me a good tuner? I want to spend around $50, but I am willing to go higher if necessary. I want to be able to record in decent quality.

Thanks in advance for the help.


Update: I found this, what do you think?

 

[Peter]

You'd have to get a DVB-C capable card to get the digital channels, and a classic analog TV tuner card for the analog ones. There are "dual" cards that do that, although I've never seen any for DVB-C (only for -T and -S, terrestrial and Satellite).

Sound from digital TV gets forwarded through PCI inside the MPEG stream; sound from analog TV can go through PCI as well, or be fed directly into the sound circuitry through a loopback cable.

 

[villageidiot111]

Bumpity bump.

 

[Traire]

Originally posted by: villageidiot111
So, I am considering buying a basic tuner card, and there are some things I just don't know about them.

I have digital cable. Some channels are digital, some aren't. Will this card be able view all channels, or just the non-digital ones?

See what Peter wrote about the DVB-C compatability. You definetly wont find this in a card for under $100.

How do the tuners get the sound to the computer? Is there a cable (internal or external) that hooks up, or can I just stick the card in and it will work?

Some have a cable that loops back around to the sound card auxilary input, but most will feed the sound to the sound card internally, so you just have to plug it in.

Do most tuners come with software, or is that something I will have to invest in?

They all pretty much come with something, although the quality will vary greatly. Some of the better known software you can purchase seperatly are "Snapstream BeyondTV" and "SageTV." A free alternative is GB-PVR. Check out Http://www.tv-cards.com for lots of infor.

Can you recommend me a good tuner? I want to spend around $50, but I am willing to go higher if necessary. I want to be able to record in decent quality.

For under $50, you will likely get a card the does not have hardware encoding, meaning the computers CPU must handle the majority of the encoding process, and will consume nearly 100% of your CPU's computing power. This means if you have a slow computer, or you want to do anything, even browsing the internet, while recording without having artifacts or skipped frames in your video, you will need a card with a hardware encoding ability. These cards do all the conversion from analog signal to a digital mpg or mp2 file on the card itself, leaving your CPU nearly free of any burden. Some of the better cards would be Hauppauge's PVR-150, 250, and 500 series cards, and ATi's Theater550 cards (which you can get cheaper from Saphire).

Thanks in advance for the help.


Update: I found this, what do you think?

That would work fine to watch TV, but if you want really good quality recordings, I would look for something with a hardware mpeg2 encoding ability. The Hauppauge PVR-150 or the Saphire Theater550 cards can be found in the $75-90 price range. Combine either with a software program like BeyondTV or GB-PVR, and youll have everything you would need.

 

[Traire]

You will also need a pretty good sized hard drive to record to. A recording of an hour of mp2 video at high quality will run you about 6gb per hour. You can lower the recording bit rate, and use variable bit rates to shrink the file size, but will also result in loss of quality the lower you go.

However, once you have the file on your computer, you can use something like Windows Media Encoder 9, or XviD/DivX to re-encode the file to WMV or Xvid file, which will reduce the file size to about 1/10th of the original. This is the best option if your planning on keeping the files on your computer for later watching.

For example, I record programs at a constant bit rate of 12,000 b/s. I then use Windows Media Encoder to re-encode the files to WMV. A 30 minute clip of WMV at medium quality runs about 400-500mb per hour of video.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Well, you might be able to use the STB (Set Top Box) as the signal decoder and simply pass the cable-out/RCA-out to your tuner card and use something like USB-UIRT to handle changing the channels. This way your tuner card only needs to see channel 3\4 and you handle all the channels through the cable/satilite box. The USB-UIRT is like $10-15 and you should be able to get a half decent turner for under $50 now, since all you need is a tuner that has decent picture quality...