Who makes a good TV tuner card?
And can you record more than one TV show at a time?
Thanks
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Who makes a good TV tuner card?
And can you record more than one TV show at a time?
Thanks
Hauppauge appears to be quite popular.
I use Hauppauge and am satisfied,but be careful. Don't use the drivers on the included disk. Get the latest for your version from their website.
example
I had the Hauppauge hardware but believe me, this software I have posted in this forum link is far easier to work with and the results are pretty good.
http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=243231
As I noted in a different thread, I have been slowly building a HTPC and the last component I need is a Tuner. I have been looking at various tuners the last several months and have a little bit of familiarity with the offerings, but no direct experience. Based on my research, many of the internal tuner cards have dual tuners that will allow you to record 1 program and watch another. I do not believe I have come across any that will allow you to record 2 shows at the same time. That said, there are some external tuners that might as I believe Ceton is about to come out with a 4 tuner external unit that uses a cablecard from your cable company - will act like a set top box.
If your budget is relatively unlimited you could buy a Western Digital DVR 1212, which is an external tuner / recorder / HD that connects to your PC and buy an internal card. THe WD 1212 would record one channel on its HD pass another channel to the PC where the internal tuner could record the second channel.
As the others siad, Hauppauge seems to make the more popular tuners. Also, decide whether you are going to use Windows Media Center or third party software to do your recording as many times the software bundled with the cards is crap. Windows Media Center comes bundled with Vista and Win7, and actually seems to work quite well in Win7. All of the above 2 cents is based on my research and no actual edperience as I am waiting on the release of the ATI External CableCard tuner so I can replace my set top boxe and directly record the HD channels I subscribe to.
I have both Hauppauge and Terratec tuners on my rigs. Both are equally good, and are outstanding when used with Windows Media Centre. However, if you don't have Media Centre, the Hauppauge WinTV software is truly dire :(
With Media Centre, you can record as many shows as you have supported tuners, or you can watch and record simultaneously. How many tuners are supported is a bit complicated - with Win7, it's easy enough, you can have up to 4 tuners. For Vista, how many tuners were supported depends an what region you are in, it was 2 tuners for Europe, but I think 4 tuners may have been supported for North America. I think only 2 tuners are supported on WinXP MCE, but I may be wrong about that, it's possible that 4 tuners were supported in North America on that too.
You can have tuners in any combination of hardware that you like - 2 twin tuner cards, for example, or 4 single tuner cards, or a twin tuner card, and a couple of USB tuners.
Thanks SuperSparks for correcting my misinformation on the ability to record 2 shows at the same time with WMC. As I said, my information was all based on research and not experience (sorta like some of my college business professors) and my focus was not on recording more than 1 show at a time.
I do have a question for you in that regard. Have you tried recording 2 shows at the same time and did you encounter any proceesor, memory or storage performance issues that affected the result?
I have recorded 2 shows simultaneously many times using Media Centre, starting way back with XP MCE, through Vista and now with Win 7. CPU and memory usage is negligible - the tuner card itself does pretty much all of the processing. As for storage, you do need a large drive. My one criticism of Media Centre is how inefficient the compression is, and they take up a lot of room. On my latest build, I have put a 1.5TB drive in a caddy purely for MC storage, so that when it fills up I can just slap in another drive. On the other hand, it doesn't need to b a high-performance drive, a 5400RPM "Eco" drive will do fine.
To give you an idea of how much room a TV programme takes:
With one card?Quote:
Originally Posted by SuperSparks
And do you have a card recommendation? Or 2 or 3? For a XP MCE system.
And thanks for your help..
Rod
With one twin tuner card.
I can only recommend Hauppauge and Terratec brands, our TV standards are different to yours, so the individual models of tuner that I've used aren't available on your side of the pond.
My research had shown the storage requirements could be fairly significant and your numbers show that. BTW, those are some intersting shows you have recorded - too bad we don't get a lot of that type of show in the USA.
I've just installed the Hauppauge 2250, tried both the Hauppauge WinTV software, as well as the WMC, believe me, I don't wish to go back to the WinTV software. I'm trying to record 2 shows, at the same time (same time slot); will find out soon enough how they both look. But as for "live" viewing, I must say I'm a bit disappointed with the quality of the picture; which let me to think that if I'd only pay $150 Cdn for the card, I should only expect the picture to be the same quality as a $150 TV?
Let ask you guy this: Am I misled to think that using a 1920 x 1200 LCD PC monitor for viewing either TV programming, or DVD; one should not expect the same good quality as a regular TV, LCD or otherwise, for the same TV programming, or DVD? I was totally disappointed, firstly, when I was viewing a DVD movie on my PC, then secondly viewing TV programs via a TV-tuner card. Perhaps I have not set up the LCD monitor correctly for viewing TV/DVD signals; either that or my expectations have been misled.
https://discussions.virtualdr.com/im.../2012/04/1.png
The quality that you get depends mostly on the transmission bitrate that they use, and how much compression, etc. I've been using Media Centre since it was first introduced, using several different tuner cards over that period, and I can honestly say that I've never noticed any difference between the quality of the cards themselves. But the quality of the TV picture varies enormously, at least over here. Some of the BBC wildlife documentaries are simply awesome, but for the most part, I'd agree that the quality is pretty poor :(
I was in conversation w. a friend, and he offered a very logical explanation for my misled expectation: the TV picture is made up of only 560 pixels across, as compare to the PC's screen of 1920 pixels across. In other words, the TV picture is being stretched 4 times as large on a PC screen (especially when viewed in "full screen" mode on a 24" monitor). It is no wander that the TV picture would be seen as very grainy.
After this explanation, my guess is to burn the recorded TV program on a DVD, then play it in a DVD player that's connected to a regular TV, and see how the picture would look like on a TV screen.