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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."
Personally, I think that external FireWire are the best, because they seem to have better cross-platform compatibility. I use a Mac, and it's hard to find someware for internal PCI tuners.
Seriously, what do people use them for? The primary reason I can think of goes along the line of video editing. Other than that, I can't really see why people would forego a generally bigger/cheaper TV screen to see video on a smaller window on a computer monitor.
Any arguments of mobility (as in using laptops to view stuff) seems weak since you'd need to PLUG your TV-tuner onto an antenna/cable/vcr/etc. to get anything.
I'd seriously like to know what uses people have had for such things and reasons why such devices would be worth looking into.
Don't ever buy Leadtek. I had the 2000 XP tuner card, and had absolutely nothing but trouble with it. But it wasn't just me...two of my friends got the same card as well at the same time, as they were on sale, and had exactly the same problems as me.
First, the software sucks. 50% of the time the OSD doesn't work. I would regularly get the stereo channel out one speaker and the SAP channel out of the other. Sometimes I'd totally lose audio and have to reboot to fix it. While those are pretty minor problems, the absolute worst was recording. Basically, it never worked. I would depend on the software to record courses I was taking that were broadcast on my university's cable channel, and most of the time it down right didn't record anything. I totally gave up on it. And this wasn't just an issue with one version of their PVR software...this was a problem in every version I tried over the two or more years I had that card. The customer support was atrocious...basically they didn't ever answer my, or my friends, questions about the failing recording. And I won't even get into the horrible sound effects during the software installation, or the stupid blinking (!!) lights around the border of the viewing window.
Then I wanted to get Snapstream's software, because it looked really sweet. Guess what...Leadtek refused to help them resolve issues they had with their cards, so Snapstream couldn't support the Leadtek cards at all. Finally I broke down, spent the money on one of the Snapstream bundles that came with a PCI Hauppauge! card, and have had no problems at all with it.
So my advice is avoid Leadtek at all costs.
With the apparent growth of digital cable and satellite, can TV tuners even be used in the future? It's nice to have a custom tivo-type PC that you can do anything with, but would that be possible a few years from now?
pcHDTV
Doesn't work with cable or satellite (not sure if this is a hardware or driver limitation) but can decode both NTSC and HDTV. Completely open platform, so completely open drivers.
- Digital TV in Australia isn't worth bothering about.
- A VCR is still easier to tape Angel with than some sort of digital system.
My PC, while it has a Zalman NR power supply is still much noisier than a VCR, and the software that came with my cheap digital card isn't the world's most stable -- playback is okay, recording typically causes it to crash.Shit drivers for TV tuner card getting you down? Just use a better driver, dumbass.
POKE 36879,8
Digital TV in Australia isn't worth bothering about
You certainly share my thoughts in some respect - although most content is at least 16x9 SD, in the cities at least, the digital signal does show up a lot of poorer editing processes and artifacts during the production process.
On the other hand, in Melbourne and Brisbane we have 1080i HD (@1920x1080) and that looks absolutely stunning on some programs, and movies.
And with XMLTV support built-in, it's an even better application than just a TV tuner!
It's a pity that channel seven are still unable to show most of their sport or live shows in widescreen, while even the ABC manages to show local football matches with fantastic widescreen picture. It was also disappointing that this year's formula 1 race here in Melbourne wasn't widescreen, but that wasn't channel ten's fault, as the f1 guys have taken back control over the tv coverage.
It has been a bit disappointing lately, with the amount of HD programming seeming to drop off a little. It's hard to believe that a few years ago, the three original star wars movies were shown in HD with 5.1 sound on Nine. Now the only show with 5.1 sound is A Current Affair (and maybe Mcloud's daughters). But the picture quality on shows like The Panel make them an absolute treat to watch.
For anyone wanting to see what's available in HD and SD, there's a pretty complete and accurate guide at www.widescreentv.info. Just ignore 7's "HD", which really shouldn't count as HD. They use the 576p format, yet most of their content comes from 1080i sources (both internally (apparently), and externally). So while we will apparently get some of the Olympics in "HD", it's pretty disappointing that they won't just show it in the correct 1080i format it's produced in.
The WinTV PCI Radio (or PCI FM) is the same card with an FM radio tuner as well -- the radio also works just fine under Linux.
There are a few other bt848 and bt878 cards out there as well. While they're a little old, they've got one especially cool feature many other cards don't: card-to-card bus mastering. With most modern video cards, you can have the cards talk to each other directly and the TV card uses zero CPU cycles -- just a smidge of bus contention when you're banging on video.
That said, the card can be a bit of a bitch with Windows XP. Hauppauge's driver engineers haven't kept the drivers very well up to date.
Now, if I just had a box powerful enough to drive one of these...
Your box is powerful enough to drive one of these.
The Bt8x8 line have an on-die risc processor and are designed to perform pci busmaster transfers directly into your video card's memory with little to no interference from your processor once you've set them up.
You could use it on a Pentium 60. You could use it on a 486 if it didn't require stuff that's in post-486-era pci specs.
The overlay transfer uses essentially zero cpu. In fact, if you crash the OS, the overlay transfer keeps going and the video window remains live because the southbridge is still live even if the cpu is trapped.
The PROBLEM, is that mostly the windows drivers don't use the overlay method for reasons that are lame. they use the grab-and-display method, which is dumber than dumb.
The btwincap drivers get around that issue. it's also a total nonissue in linux.
*recording video is another story entirely.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Oh, something else I should mention. The audio tracks that broadcast with HD channels typically use less compression (in the audio sense, not the data sense), so the tracks may sound softer than the SD channels. Turn up the volume on your receiver, and you'll be okay. Unless your receiver really sucks, you won't have to turn it up much, and you shouldn't be anywhere near the distortion point of your receiver. For example, I typically watch SD feeds at -30 (Denon receivers go from -50 or -100 to some positive value I've never tried to reach. A volume of "0" is very, very loud). When I switch to a HD channel, I'll typically need to bump up the volume to -20 (I'll put it up to -15, or sometimes even -10 when watching movies). My DVD player's DD5.1 output is the same, with the proper volume level being somewhere between -15 and -20 for most movies. Oddly, though, my XBox's DD5.1 (in games) rarely needs to go higher than -30, though some games do seem to be softer than others (PGR2 plays best at -25).
So, try playing with the volume of your receiver. It may be that the tracks seem to lose definition simply because they're playing too quietly.
Half a decade ago I bought a pci hauppauge wintv bt878-based card, and I'm still using it to this day. The windows apps that came with it sucked, and the upgrades to them sucked even worse, with UI's that seemed to be designed to be illogical on purpose, and channel switching that took more than a second. But in a linux machine, with tvtime (which uses dscaler in its backend), it's an awesome card. Super-smooth image, near-instantaneous channel switching, teletext (using alevt) and lirc-supported ir remote. Everyone who sees tvtime playing full screen for the first time comments on the great picture quality. My impression is that if you're going to buy a tv-card, better make sure it has a bt848/878 chipset.
I am still using their first PCI card (bt878) in my Linux box. They have been a Linux friendly company.
http://www.hauppauge.com/
With this 'old' card I can do full frame rate video recording.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I've got a good answer to ATI driver problems. Buy a card with a Radeon 7000 chipset. $34.70, DVI out, TV out, and they don't seem to have any driver problems. The card is so bottom end that ATI tech support seems to hate to admit they even exist. Plenty good if you don't run games.
Reading these posts about ATI driver problems is an experience for me like listening to people complain about mosquitos or athlete's foot or getting a cold. People have been doing that for centuries, and in equivalent computer years, it probably has been that long the world has been experiencing ATI driver flakiness.
Suppose ATI is not really a video chipset maker. Suppose the company's real purpose is to make faulty drivers? Maybe the company is run by some rich guy who doesn't need to make any more money, and likes to annoy people.
Maybe ATI stands for Absence of Test Instruments.
Do you ever wonder about the sociology of ATI driver quirks? Matrox released drivers every few months, and rarely had problems. nVidia has been the same, in my experience. What conditions exist that ATI sometimes, in the past, released new drivers every few days? After releasing faulty drivers every few days for weeks, wasn't there anyone at ATI idealistic enough to decide that they needed to do better?
Anyhow, I agree with a comment above that they seem to have gotten better.
ATI and drivers have been one of the mysteries of the universe. Sure, it's not on the level of a short guy with black hair telling tall blond Germans that they are the master race, but it is a mystery nevertheless.
You can probably tell from the tone of this comment that I too am an ATI rakee, as in being raked over the coals several times by ATI drivers.