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tv tuners

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dephektr

Member
Im thinking about buying a tv tuner card but want to know why the big jump in prices. There are some that are $40 and then $140. what should i look for in buying these? do some have some sort of processing power to convert video in real time and will it encode to any type of media (.mpg .avi etc)?
 
software encoder cards are the cheapest, $20-50, they need a fast CPU (over 2 GHz for best results) and are more likely to drop frames and have audio sync problems

for $60-100 you get cards like the Hauppage PVR-150 with hardware MPEG2 (DVD) encoding, no dropped frames but the max. resolution is 720x480 like DVD

Above $100 you find fancier hardware encoder cards for standard resolution (2nd tuner, hardware decoding) and cards for HDTV.
 
I'm sold on ATI AIW cards.......the support for these cards is excellent. The tuners work w/o problem. The capture abilities of any of these cards is just fine.

They also save you a PCI slot over a separate card. I tried several USB tuner/capture cards. Not impressed....they use much more computing power than the PCI/AGP tuners.
And I always could see a slight delay between the video and audio with a USB solution.

AIWs can be had cheap......my 9600 cost $99 new, complete with a remote.
 
I bought the Hauppauge PVR150-MCE for my media center build, but now I'd probably buy the Sapphire Theatrix 550...slightly better video quality plus onboard memory.

Link

Jason
 
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