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Which TV tuner is better

Impossible to answer, really. Hauppage uses tuners of different models by several manufacturers (mostly Phillips) so your mileage may vary slightly.

I have two hauppage PVR150MCEs, both with Phillips tuners. One is ever so slightly noisier than the other. Both are simply amazing in video quality -- switching from viewing the Hauppage card output on the TV to the TV tuner is a perceptible difference in favor of the PVR150 cards. And I used to think our new generation TV tuner was good.

My next door neighbor has an older generation all in wonder card. It's also not bad, but I'm not able to compare apples to apples on the same TV with the two. But remember, you can use the discrete PVR150 in a different machine or after you upgrade/downgrade your video card. Something you can't do when it's glued onto your main graphics card.


 
I assume he means the AIW X1800XL perhaps? To answer the question, both have their strenghts and weaknesses. The PVR-150 uses a hardware mpeg-2 capture chip and is slightly less prone to drop frames if your cpu is being otherwise stressed. The AIW tuner lets you capture directly to WMV or MPEG-4 while the PVR-150 is only MPEG2.
 
Well, I got the X800 for $129 and was wondering if I should replace my PVR-150 (its a big card BTW and not the low-profile version) which I got for $50 after rebate. The ATI will be for gaming so I was wondering if there would be a drop in picture quality, also the ATI comes with Component inputs and outputs which allow me to connect my Xbox 360 to it for use on my 20.1" widescreen.
Edit: Software is not my concern because I use BeyondTV anyway.
 
I would use the ATI card for the XBOX and the PVR 150 for any vid capture you want to do. Hauppauge cards will usually have better driver support for third party apps like beyondTV than an ATI tuner will.
 
ATI Tuners and their software are pretty ass-tastic in my experience. ATI's most recent tuner, the 550 has good image quality but the software is abysmal. Their older tuners (the ones on X800XT AIW cards) are much much worse. I'd go with the hauppage. If you want the best image quality out of it, use dscalar for your tv viewer. It uses a lot of cpu power but the results are fantastic.
 
Two tips:

1. If you want to game while recording TV, then you need either a tuner with a hardware encoder (i.e. PVR-150) or a dual-core CPU.

2. If you want to use the tuner's inputs to play console games, you need a software encoder (i.e. ATI AIW). Hardware encoders have a ~2 sec. delay IIRC which is the period they buffer to encode the video before it ever hits the PCI/PCI-E bus.
 
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