What's the BEST image quality TV Tuner card?

[lozina]

I currently have the WinFast 2000 XP, but I keep hearing people say it's image quality is not that great, so I wonder which one is at the top of the list?

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

one of those hauppage hdtv tuners would be my guess.

 

[lozina]

Those look pretty nice, but I don't have HD so it won't help me... but their WinTV-D card might be the one for me.

What I wanna do is record an event off of my Digital Satellite receiver, then burn it later onto DVD hoping to have the same video quality as I would while wathcing the event on TV. Also would be nice to watch the event on TV while it is recording, jsut in case- and it looks like this WinTV-D lets you do that. Pipe the digital output from receiver to my computer, record it, while sending the output from the card to my TV.

Anyone use this card and can vouche for it's image quality?

 

[lozina]

Anyone able to capture video off their TVs and record onto DVD to result in same video quality as the original on TV?

 

[Peter]

You don't record to DVD directly. What you need to do is run raw, uncompressed capture from the TV card to HDD, and then encode to DVD compressed standard in whatever quality you like.
The recording to HDD can be done in full resolution and frame rate no problem, from any PCI TV card out there ... if your HDD is big and fast enough.

 

[Tab]

How about that $1,000 Matrox Video Editing Card on the egg?

 

[Jeraden]

According to the folks over at avsforum, the flyvideo 2000 card has the best quality. It can be had online for around $50, but not a whole lot of places carry it. It uses some new Phillips chip instead of the older generation decoding chips. Might want to go over there and into the Home Theater Computers forum and do a search.

 

[wicktron]

Matrox G450 eTV

 

[lozina]

Originally posted by: Peter
You don't record to DVD directly. What you need to do is run raw, uncompressed capture from the TV card to HDD, and then encode to DVD compressed standard in whatever quality you like.
The recording to HDD can be done in full resolution and frame rate no problem, from any PCI TV card out there ... if your HDD is big and fast enough.

Would the 'AVI uncompressed' option on my capture card be the rawest format ?

Do I have to encode that at all or is it possible to just burn that onto a DVD?

The HDD I'm using is a 36 gig Ultra 160 SCSI- I hope that it's fast enough to keep up recoridng the raw video feed in an uncompressed format

 

[lozina]

Originally posted by: Jeraden
According to the folks over at avsforum, the flyvideo 2000 card has the best quality. It can be had online for around $50, but not a whole lot of places carry it. It uses some new Phillips chip instead of the older generation decoding chips. Might want to go over there and into the Home Theater Computers forum and do a search.

Hmm, I noticed one of ASUS's cards also has a Phillips TV Tuner chip, wonder if it's the same one... it's much easier to find than that flyvideo card I imagine

 

[Peter]

I have a 9-GByte U80 SCSI that does cope with the data stream, but of course fills up quickly. Uncompressed AVI sounds good - but if you want to make a DVD that's playable on an actual DVD player, you'll have to encode it by the DVD standard.

 

[MDE]

ATI TV cards use Phillips tuners if I'm not mistaken. BTW, the ATI TV Wonder VE\Pro are nice solutions, the differences between the VE and Pro being stereo sound and S-video connectors.

 

[LikwidNitrogen]

Originally posted by: lozina

Originally posted by: Peter
You don't record to DVD directly. What you need to do is run raw, uncompressed capture from the TV card to HDD, and then encode to DVD compressed standard in whatever quality you like.
The recording to HDD can be done in full resolution and frame rate no problem, from any PCI TV card out there ... if your HDD is big and fast enough.

Would the 'AVI uncompressed' option on my capture card be the rawest format ?

Do I have to encode that at all or is it possible to just burn that onto a DVD?

The HDD I'm using is a 36 gig Ultra 160 SCSI- I hope that it's fast enough to keep up recoridng the raw video feed in an uncompressed format

You can burn the .avi onto the DVD and watch it on other computers, but to watch it on any standalone player, it needs to be in the mpeg2 dvd format. You can probably find some freeware for this conversion.

 

[gte343z]

may want to read this review on personal video recorders. explains benifits of hardware encoding and quality of capture for pinnacle pctv and hauppage pvr-250

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pvr/