Your thoughts on these TV Tuners

[applesseed]

Currently I have a Leadtek Winfast 2000 Expert. It's been good, but there's no closed caption support. It only does Teletext. So I'm looking for another PCI TV tuner that supports closed-captioning. Switching channels were to me... fast, but I've had bad experience with their new driver so I'm still using the old ones that came with the package.

I went out and bought an AverMedia AverTV Go 007 FM Plus ($20 MIR from Fry's). I liked the feature but starting up the application and lag time between channels killed me - it is extremely slow. Plus I have cable TV and there's gotta be more than 125 channels - I only got like 70% of it. I'm gonna return it.

So I did a search here on AnandTech and seems like people here likes Hauppauge 150 and or 250. I'm shooting for the 350 with the FM radio. What's the lag time between channels in a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR?

I'm also considering the ATI TV Wonder Pro. I used to have a ATI video card with TV tuner but it hogs the resource badly so after I got my new computer I decided to just get things separated.

What I'm looking for...

TV tuner
Closed-caption
Ability to listen to FM radio (not a must have but nice feature)
Capture card that allows me to transfer videocassettes to my computer - to convert analog to digital.


What's your recommendation? Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350 vs ATI TV Wonder Pro. I'm also open to any TV tuners that I may have missed.




Oh yeah... LifeView, KWorld, Diamond XTreme TV I think they don't support CC.

Thanks!

 

[IeraseU]

I would get the Hauppauge PVR 150 MCE. It has FM stereo and is a lot cheaper then the 350. What the 350 has is a feature you'll probably never use, onboard mpeg 2 'decoding'...."but", it only works if you use the s-video line out, it wont function on your monitor. No big deal, almost any decent modern video card will decode mpeg 2 for you easily, so you won't miss this feature.

ATI's new cards based on the 550 Rage theater chip are also very good. I think they actually have better image quality then hauppauge cards over coaxial or composite inputs (equal via s-video). The problem with these cards is they are only officially supported in Win XP media center addition, and ATI has said it does not plan to support them outside of MCE. So if you run into any problem, dont expect updated driver fixes, since ATI is only concentrating on MCE support.


Oh yes, all these cards have built in mpeg2 encoding, as such they are *not* suitable to use if you want to play videogames on your pc. You see the reason is no matter how fast they encode, no encoder is fast enough to do it 'in real time', so there will be a 1second lag time between pushing buttons on your controller and seeing that action reflected on the screen. If you want to play games on your pc, choose a solution with software encoding.....since they only use your cpu to encode when actually capturing, the rest of the time they just pass the signal through.

If your main function is to convert VCR to DVD, both will work for you easily, and the mpeg2 native support will save you time since you won't have to convert it over when authoring the DVD. To sum it up, the ATI probably has better hardware imo, but they have more limited driver support. The Hauppauge cards are very widely supported, but slightly trail behind ATI in image quality (imo).

 

[applesseed]

Thanks IerasuU

I guess I'm leaning toward the Hauppauge