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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.
Shit drivers for TV tuner card getting you down? Just use a better driver, dumbass.
POKE 36879,8
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.