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TV Tuner Recommendations?

K

kcbass

Golden Member
In the past I've used ATI's AIW cards, and used to love all the features they provided. My most recent card, the X800 XT left me a bit disappointed with the input signals being dleayed a fraction of a second (destroyed my ability to play my gamecube through my computer). ATI's explanation was that the card used digital sound, so it delayed video to allow time for the sound to be decoded so that they were synchronized. This also created an echo effect if my roommates were watchint the same channel in another room...very annoying. Anyway, looking for a tv tuner that can give me tv, and another input for a game system. I plan to use this on a system with a gefore 8800 GTX. Any recommendations would be appreciated. 
 
I recently bought one of these:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1600.html

and have been pretty happy so far. Not only does it do standard cable/antenna TV, it'll also do OTA (read: free) HDTV. Depending on your location, you can get a cheap antenna (mine cost $25 at circuit city). It does hardware MPEG2 encoding, which is what separates cheap TV cards from good ones.

Only downside is no linux support yet.
 
Oh, I meant to mention.

TV cards (from what I have read) introduce a significant lag into the video and audio and make consoles unplayable. There might be some exceptions to that, I'm not sure what they would be.

That card does have SVideo in, btw.
 
I used to be able to play consoles on the old AIW cards, just not the new models, which I'm very upset about. You'd think that the more advanced cards got, the more features they'd have, but instead we're losing features that we expect. 
 
I have an external box that takes in my cable connection and my rca in to a vga signal, and i have this connected to the analog input on my lcd, but I was really using that as a temporary solution until I could get a card to do it so everything was in my case. I would think there's got to be a card out there that has CATV in and RCA in as well. 
 
Hey kcbass,

Any modern TV tuner that you buy with a hardware encoder and digital sound is going to have the delay issue, because it's all digital instead of passing analog audio signals straight through to the sound card. If you want a good, single-tuner modern TV card, try the Hauppauge PVR-150, I have it and love it. If you really want to use your console on your computer, you might consider a method of hooking your monitor directly to it, or another analog PCI capture card with the appropriate inputs.
 
I've read that Hauppauge is having stock problems with the PVR-150 and is shipping the HVR-1600 in its place....forget where though.
 
I'll check those out, thanks. I may just be cursed to use my external box until I buy an lcd with multiple inputs, but I appreciate the help. 
 
Originally posted by: noagname
try
winfast tv 2000 xp
Click to expand...
Yes, a card like this will work just fine since audio is analog and there's no encoder chip. However it's not the best choice if you plan to use PVR software like BTV or SageTV with your tuner.

 
well, the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 MCE has the connections I want, but looks like it would also suffer from the delay lag I mentioned for consoles. Can anyone verify? 
 
The adaptec gamebridge appears to be exactly what I want....if only they'd stip it down and put it on a pci card.... 
 
Originally posted by: kcbass
well, the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 500 MCE has the connections I want, but looks like it would also suffer from the delay lag I mentioned for consoles. Can anyone verify? 
Click to expand...

The 500 is basically two 150 parts on a single PCB. So yes, same problems.

Software encoding card or external box for gamecube, hardware encoder for TV/PVR -- no way around this for your situation.
 
Originally posted by: kcbass
Anyone know if the HDTV wonder heas a delay on the rca inputs from the breakout box? 
Click to expand...

Not the same product, but a related one:

See this article, do a search for "gamecube" and then look down two posts:

http://slashdot.org/hardware/04/02/28/2228201.shtml

Originally posted on Slashdot.org by: AIX-Hood (682681)
This user is unfortunately thinking of using an mpeg-2 encoding board like a Hauppauge PVR-250 where there is indeed a lag. Boards like the ATI HDTV however just have direct analog and digital stream recording without any realtime encoding, so there's no lag here.
Click to expand...

So the HDTV board should work. Confirmation would be nice, though.
 
happuage MCE-150...has analog and digital (i think digital) inputs, composite (red, white, yellow), s-video, and an fm-tuner. works perfect in xp mce.
 
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