TV Tuner: PCI vs USB quality

[stultus]

I'm looking at building a little computer, and if I go mATX I'd have to get a fancy ($$) low-rise TV-tuner... unless I went USB 2.0. I know USB tuners are more expensive. Is there a general quality difference (i.e., no enoding possible) when using a USB TV tuner?

 

[Varun]

I've only used a really cheap USB TV Tuner and it was really really bad so I can't compare it to my ATI 550's in my media center.

That being said, all of the ATI 550's are low profile - you just have to change the plate on them to a short one, and they are not that much money:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127987

 

[Ruptga]

I use an external tuner because I have a laptop, and it works fine. It's a cheap thing, and I got what I paid for as far as the software, but I'm sure you can get a good external tuner, you just have to know where to look.

On a side note, USB's bandwidth is several times that of PCIs, but I don't know if that makes any difference or not, it may not be worth a hill of beans.

Edit: burnitdown is right, USB 2 has 60MBps of bandwidth but PCI has 133MBps. Dern marketing crap, I knew USB 2 had 480Mbps, but thought PCI was 133Mbps.

 

[Roguestar]

@OP: No.

 

[Leros]

My friend has an external USB tuner for his laptop and it looks much better than the Hauppauge PCI tuner that I have.

 

[BurnItDwn]

USB or PCI won't make a quarity difference as both technologies have more bandwidth than is required for tuning TV channels.

What will make a difference is the tv tuner chip, weather or not there is any hardware encoding or decoding, the quality of the source, the software used, and the overall quality of the machine it's connected to.
If you're connecting it to the core 2 duo in the sig, then hardware encoding or decoding are not at all necessary for smooth playback or recording, if you're going to connect it to an old pentium 3 then you had better get a tv card with a hardware encoder.

Really the only differences I know of for the PCI vs USB argument are ...
1. If you get multiple tuners, the PCI bus is bigger than the USB2 bus, so eventually, you'd be able to saturate the USB bus before the PCI bus.
2. PCI tuner cards will sometimes have better driver availability on more operating systems than the USB cards.