Tv Tuner

[Mrdzone]

Hey guys I need some opinions, I am looking to get a tv tuner...
The catch is that I have a laptop as my main system, I could get one for my desktop, but it is an OLD pentium 2 233 system, so here' what I am looking for basically
A reccommendation for a pci tv tuner that does most of the work on board and would need as little cpu power as possilbe, OR
a usb/ firewire/pcmcia tv tuner
It must accept a cable or Dss signal, and allow one to play console games on it, a remote is a plus as is included pvr software...
Thx in advance for your help guys

Mrdzone

 

[everman]

Take a look at this

Edit- and This
2nd edit: I don't really know much about either of them but I'm inclined to favor ATI.

 

[Jeff7]

You want PVR functions? Like recording shows and timeshifting? Your only option that I know of would be a WinTV-PVR card from Hauppauge....and I just checked the specs, they require a P2 450 or higher. From what I can tell, their PVR cards are the only ones on the market that do hardware MPEG2 encoding. That's unfortunate, as Hauppauge is not well known for making decent drivers.
If you want to do realtime encoding for timeshifting or recording shows, without a hardware MPEG2 encoder, you NEED a fast Athlon XP or P4. Otherwise you'll have a lovely slideshow.
USB - I don't really know how this would do either. I don't know how much CPU load a USB device, especially one like a TV tuner would require.
You could probably run a regular TV tuner on there with no problems; I had this back when I was running a P2 300, and it did a decent job. The system was only able to capture uncompressed video in realtime - the processor couldn't do any encoding fast enough - and uncompressed video will fill up a hard drive VERY fast. The one above doesn't have WinXP drivers though.
You might want to check this out; it uses a newer chip than the TV Master; the requirements list a Pentium II or Celeron as the minimum requirements; nothing about what speed; I guess your 233 should be fine for that.
The ATi card: never had experience with it, people who use it seem to like it though. I don't know what its minimum requirements.

 

[jarsoffart]

I had a Leadtek TV2000XP Deluxe and the short time I had with it was pretty good. My main focus was converting Hi8 tapes to AVI which it did fine, but I had to first use the HuffyUV codec and then use DivX or else it would be jittery. I tried MPEG2 and it worked fine, but it didn't have as good a compression as DivX. I experimented a bit with the TV Tuner functions using a 10 dollar antenna from Circuit City that I use on my TV, and the quality looked about as good as my TV. I don't have cable, so I couldn't test that out. The AM/FM functions didn't work too decently. With 102.1 KDFC the connection was not always crystal clear. My specs are as follows:

Athlon XP 1700+
Abit KR7A-RAID
Western Digital WD1000BB
256 mb Crucial DDR266
Winfast GeForce2 MX200