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TV Tuners For The PC: Internal Or External
~*77*~ writes "TV tuners are gaining popularity for simple TV watching on your home PC, as well providing capturing capabilities intended to rival Tivo style devices. BigBruin.Com has new reviews taking a look at two TV tuners in the $50 range... An internal, PCI device from Leadtek... And an external, USB 2.0 device from Transcend... Head to head testing decide whether either is worth your time or money."
For anyone with a TV card, I recommend trying DScaler - it's open-source software which can filter and display video inputs, particularly from TV cards. I've been using it for the past four years, and it's far better than the TV viewing applications that came with my Hauppage WinTV card, or my friends Pinnacle PCTV card.
I have an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder 9800SE, and I'm not really all that happy with it on the tv tuner front.
In my experience, the ATI drivers are somewhat buggy and temperamental on Windows, and worse on linux. Also, I'd love to use Videolan, but it's never worked fully with the AIW. The most recent release is actually able to use my AIW, but only the antenna signal, not the composite, so it can't capture anything from satellite or cable boxes plugged into it. Obviously, that's more of an issue with Videolan, and hopefully it'll work some day soon, but if you wanted to use Videolan with a tv tuner card, it's something you might want to consider.
That's not to say the AIW is bad, and for the price I paid I'm generally happy with it. It does do the job. Usually. But if I had more money, I would definitely have gone for a seperate tv tuner. If nothing else, it's more flexible - you can upgrade the graphics card without worrying about the tv tuner card at the same time.
In the last four years spent at university, my TV card has been the single best component I've bought for my computer - for 40 (~$60-70), it's given me TV viewing and recording facilities, with no need to take up extra space in my room and whilst transport with a TV. It's also nice to have a TV window open at the bottom of my screen whilst working :)
I had used many tv-tuner cards (ati, leadtek, hauppage, and etc.) and one I thing I could generalize is that the software (drivers and tv proggie) for these cards suck. Almost all of them have these fancy UI that never conform to any standards or sometimes even common sense (what's up with the blinky lights in leadtek programs?). Also, the limited feature set for basic tivo-like functionality. I found a nice free program called DScaler (dscaler.org) that offers a lot of features for and it's compatible with most cards. It's still in beta the last time I checked though.
Which one od you use?
Drivers for internal PCI tuners are usually crap on Windows. I think I'm on my third card, and I keep throwing them out and trying a different one because of the drivers...
For recording shows I like using a ReplayTV(a TIVO would do), then you can connect to it over the network and play your shows on your computer.
For those not familiar with DVB, this is used in Europe for satellite and terrestrial TV transmission. There is no open DVB used in the U.S.
But, we have ATSC, the new digital television standard, which broadcasts MPEG2 streams that are easy to record & play.
ATSC has the big advantage that it supports HDTV transmissions, and there is a ton of HDTV programming available. I don't think HDTV has moved past early testing phase in Europe.
DVB doesn't work in the US, does it? I think we Americans are pretty much stuck with analog reception of everything that's not over-the-air HDTV. For HDTV we have pchdtv, which works with Linux and captures a straight MPEG stream like you said. For cable, satellite, and over-the-air analog, we're stuck with capture cards like the BT8*8 and PVR-250. Analog capture works well enough to be watchable and can be encoded easily in real time on a modern (e.g., 2 GHz+) PC.
I have a hauppauge pci bttv 878 for years...
It does what it must do...
I can recommend TVTime http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/ under Linux for optimum pleasure as you can adapt to footballgames...
Don't use the given software, use DScaler or Virtual Dub.
A little pricey but well worth it, they generate excellent capture of video and encode in MPEG-2 in hardware. Very nice, and they make an excellent PVR when combined with SageTv or MythTv. They also incorporate an integrated IR remote. They have a good linux support particularly with regard to MythTV. The PVR-350 differs from the PVR-250 in that it has a S-Video output. I've also employed a Leadtek XP 2000 video capture card, nice but no hardware recording. I've had difficulty in recording the output of the LeadTek to DVD.
There's two types of TV tuners out for PCs right now: Those with hardware encoders, and those without
The cheap ones (usually under $50) do not come with hardware encoders.
Hardware encoders (usually MPEG2) look superior and are generally smoother, taking the load off your CPU. Do not assume that since you have quad-processor super PC that it's enough to output great/smooth video. A hardware MPEG2 encoder is still superior.
As for internal VS external, there's a few USB 2.0 tuners with built-in hardware encoders, but none of them work in Linux. You're better off getting a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 (or 350 if you need TV-out) and sticking it in a MythTV Linux box... The current king of Tivo-like software.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I personally own a Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Expert card, the big brother to the Deluxe. It uses the same software and drivers and yet my experience has been far better than the reviewers. (http://www.leadtek.com/multimedia/winfast_tv2000x p_expert_1.html)
;-)
The remote is brilliant. About the only thing that cannot be done from the remote is scheduling of recordings and setup (such as tuning channels). Everything else can be achieved from the remote. Their talk of not being able to start the TV/FM tuners from the power button on the remote is just wrong. If you have the WinFast Wizard running in your system tray, you can power the TV/FM tuners on and off without a problem using the remote. You don't need to start it from the keyboard/mouse at all.
The size of the files when recording a show can be an issue. However, I use DivX codecs for that and the sizes are exceptionally smaller than standard MPEG1/2 file sizes. That goes without saying. What bothered me however is that I didn't experience anywhere near the sizes they described when using the MPEG1/2 codecs. 5 minutes of TV recording for me using those codecs is around 500KB, not nearly 800KB. Maybe there is an extra setting he had altered that I have not, or maybe I have just tweaked mine a little more. However, the bitrates and such were the same as what I have in my default profiles.
As I live in New Zealand, I cannot use Titan or any other service to book recordings for my shows. I do that manually. I cannot speak for the experience he had with Titan. As far as manually setting up recordings go, its very simple and straight forward. Select the channel, select the start/finish times, select the encoding profile and then give it a filename. Very simple. The date/time is appended to the filename so that if you have multiple recordings with the same name, or just forget to give it a name, the file will always have a unique, timestamped name. This is very useful if you have several episodes of a weekly show recorded so you can easily find the episode you're looking for.
Personally, I love this card myself. I find it brilliant, easy to use and so far, all other software beyond that which comes with the card has not been suitable to my personal likes. The bundled software has been the best. Not even BeyondTV 3 from Snapstream was good enough for me. I liked the way I could watch recorded shows from anywhere, but the software itself just wasn't nice to use (and it doesn't support the remote for this card).
I have used this card with MythTV as well. That is nice and its very straight forward to get running. The remote works, with some external help, and the only thing I found myself doing was changing the volume/channel buttons on the remote to work more like cursor navigation buttons. I then had the fine tune buttons setup for changing the volume and just used the number buttons for changing channels. However, in the end, it did all work nicely and was a very satisfactory setup for a full time PVR. Unfortunately I like to use my computer for more than just watching TV
Do I recommend this card? Most definitely. Of all the TV tuner cards I've owned (6 over the years now) this is the best to date.