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What are some good TV TUNER / PVR card / devices?

G

Gannon

Senior member
I'm in the market for a decent TV tuner card that will allow progressive scan to be taken advantage of, and I wouldn't mind MPEG-2 capture / decoding either as long as there is no dropped frames and audio timing issues. Anyone have experience with them? I used to have an old ATI TV wonder card that was fine for watching regular broadcast TV on but was horrible at video capture only because it dropped frames, not because the capture was inherently bad. Also it had file size limit of 2GB capture and I shudder to think the tech hasn't changed much since then.
 
I'm very happy with my ATI TV Wonder VE (mono) (Pro is stereo sound). I recorded the Apprentice 3-hour finale and that did me in 3+ gigs. To my surprise, I opened the huge file and it did indeed play. Windows is the reason for the 2 GB limit, maybe even FAT32 or something. I have no idea, but it's not the card's fault it doesn't capture 2+ GB. The dropped frames are a CPU speed issue, I have never had any dropped frames on a P4 3.4 GHz Northwood. This card does not have MPEG2 encoding onboard as far as I know. Wait for the ATI Theater 550 chip to come out around this month. Sapphire is making a board based on it in the same month, supposedly. It's supposed to be superior to the Theater 200 (TV Wonder) for capturing video and I'm not sure about progressive scan capabilities. You can also blame bad capturing on EMI interference from other components near your PCI slot in which case you could try a USB tuner. If I were you I'd wait for the Theater 550 'cause it's supposed to be a lot better. In the latest version of Multimedia Center (ATI TV program) they have something called Videosoap that helps clean up video interference quite a bit but unfortunately it's not real time (you can't WATCH clean TV, only after it was recorded anyway).

What are you going to be doing with this card and what do you mean by progressive scan??? DVD/HDTV?

hope this helps
-xtknight
 
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