TV tuners

[Sentry666]

I need some recommendations for a good TV tuner card. I already had ATI's TV Wonder PCI, but I was not quite satisfied with it. Drivers were the biggest problem though.
I need something that has GOOD drivers and supports all win($ux) operating systems. Also it must be good at capturing video. Built in MPEG-2 support wouldn't hurt. And I need a card that supports PAL.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Hanky]

I was quite happy with the Hauppauge cards I had and still have. If you really want hardware MPEG2-support your only choice seems to be the Hauppauge WinTV PVR which has a hefty price tag and some problems though. For more information look here.

 

[JoeDaddy]

<< If you really want hardware MPEG2-support your only choice seems to be the Hauppauge WinTV PVR which has a hefty price tag >>



Well the Voodoo3 3500TV works perfectly and has MPEG2-support. Only problem would be drivers. I was able to pick up V3 3500TV w/ Pal output for $75US.

 

[Hanky]

I seriously doubt the V3 3500 TV has hardware MPEG2 encoding chips onboard like the WinTV PVR.

 

[JoeDaddy]

<< I seriously doubt the V3 3500 TV has hardware MPEG2 encoding chips onboard like the WinTV PVR.
>>



The Win-TV PVR uses the Brooktree BT878, and the Voodoo uses the Brooktree BT869

I stand corrected.

 

[Hanky]

JoeDaddy,

now you start to become horrible INcorrect! The BT869 is a TV ENCODER chip, which various video card manufacturers use for the TV-Out on their cards just like 3dfx did with the V3 3500 TV. To prove my statement, I give you a link to this Anandtech article. The BT878 on the other side is a TV DECODER chip used on almost all newer TV add-on cards like the WinTVs. I'm not sure which chip 3dfx used on the V3 3500 TV because All-In-Wonder-like cards are a different story...on the ATI AIWs the Rage Theater chip does what the BT878 does on WinTV cards (and more). Anyway, the BT869 and BT878 are two completely different chips which do completely different things.

The WinTV PVR has some more chips though and these are the MPEG2 encoding chips which no other card I know has.

 

[Sentry666]

Thanks for all the help. I have one more question->
I see that the Hauppage PVR is a very powerful card (and it costs heck-of-a-lot). But what about other models?
Hanky, what's the max capture resolution that you were able to get on your model using mpeg1, mpeg2 or divx? And does it work OK? A lot of users complain about some very nasty interlace on ATI TV Wonder... So I don't want anything like it again =)

 

[Hanky]

I used a BT848 version of the WinTV PCI, the newer (with BT878) WinTV PCI-FM and a KNC One TV Station RDS. Qualitywise the new WinTV PCI looked best for my eyes and capturing TV is o.k. if your CPU is powerful enough (at least 800 MHz).
Of course I never captured to MPEG1 or 2 directly so far...when you want to create MPEG1 (VCD) or MPEG2 (SVCD) it's the best solution to capture to MJPEG (using the PIC Video Codec for example) or to capture with Huffyuv, which I haven't tried so far but I just bought a large, new HDD to try it...anyway with the PIC Video codec 352x288 (for VCDs) works absolutely perfect while 480x576 (for SVCDs) is a bit slow on my Athlon 800 (dropped frames...).
Capturing DivX works good speedwise but full PAL resolution is too slow again. The sad thing is that resolutions between full and 1/4 PAL resolution (384x288 if I'm correct, some call it 1/2 PAL resolution) don't work properly because of the nasty interlace effects you also reported of (even though my system would be fast enough...). 384x288 works perfectly though.

 

[Sentry666]

Well, I'm a bit low on HDD @ the moment and my CPU isn't that powerful (celeron 566@707).
How much disk space does MJPEG take for say an hour in 384×288 and above?

I checked out the comparisons @ VCD help and I see that some cards have limit of 640×480 resolutions, others 1600×1200 etc. So what's the point? Is this the resolution you get when you're running max screen or it's just for screenshots? If it's the first then that could explain my interlace problems with ATI (resolution too low?).

 

[Hanky]

Don't capture to MJPEG if you don't plan to make VCDs out of it (DivX seems to be better then). I only use MJPEG with the highest quality setting and then I can record something like 100 min. on one of my 20 GB partitions (352x288, VCD resolution). That's ok though, because after the conversion to MPEG1 I can delete the huge AVI-file.

Anyway, the maximum capture resolution of my WinTV PCI-FM is the full PAL resolution. Of course my system is too slow for that. I think the reason for the interlacing effects at resolutions between full and 1/4 PAL (when keeping the 4:3 aspect ratio...SVCD resolution doesn't have these effects as well) is the more or less unregular deletion of horizontal lines. IMO I don't get these effects at 1/4 PAL resolution because every second horizontal and vertical line is deleted (and not every 2.576456th or so line).

 

[Hanky]

One addition: I only talked about capture resolutions so far, nothing else...and I usually don't take TV screenshots...only capturing video.