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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.
Get yourself a DVB card, the quality is much better and recording is a lot less trouble.
With analog tv tuner cards you need to encode everything while with a DVB card you can just capture an mpeg stream - a lot less can go wrong and you can always cap full resolution without having to worry about the speed of your cpu or harddisk.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
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.
Think TiVo.
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
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.
Space... As I have lived in many small singles and doubles over my tenure in college I can say that having a tv tuner card has provided me with a lot of extra space. Plus it is also to be able to do things online and watch tv all at the same time. With a separate TV you would ordinarily have to look away from the computer screen to see what is happening on TV, unless you had your TV sitting right next to your computer.
Go Illini!!!
...and get one you like quickly, before They implement the broadcast flag on everything and TV tuners become totally illegal. ;)
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.
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?
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...
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Not really a good review if you ask me. Kind of light on content and really doesn't discuss the benefits of internal vs. external TV encoders.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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.
So I can sound really cool at parties by saying that I don't own a TV, while secretly watching six Friends reruns a day!
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!"
Look. These are NOT called TV Tuners. They are Capture Cards that have a TV Tuner in them. There are Capture cards without TV Tuners, so what do you call those? Single-Line in Not Tuners?
I would think that the tech minded people of this site would be a little better then that. This whole article makes me feel like I'm dealing with people that don't know anything about the tech they are talking about.
Not to mention the links in the articles didn't survive a simple slashdotting.
Okay, now that I got the rant out, here's what I've dealt with:
I own a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-PCI card. for the most part, it sucks. it's not there mass produced card (the one with the 250 in the name is), so I have to use the software they provide with the drivers they provide because 3rd party software won't work with there drivers. Well, they programs capture like shit. Video is fine, audio is real, real bad.
Luckly someone provides 3rd party drivers for that card and a whole slew of other cards. The drivers are tricky to set up, but i'm sure most people here (cept the posers and they guy who wrote and submitted this article) should be able to figure it out.
I also used a Ati All in wonder card (9600 varity), it's not too bad at all, actually. Didn't get to test out it's recording capabilities though (it wasn't my card), but I really like it's software.
I would personally probably buy an external one next time, because of the portability.
But what I would actually rather have would be an external Capture device that had build in harddrive and networking capabilities (prefer line, but wireless might be okay). Possibly a
Tivo like device that has network capabilities. Being able to manipulate what I recorded so I can archive it in whatever formats I want is necessary.
that's my little rant, I hope. sorry if it offends, but next time don't be so stupid.
Be seeing you...
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.
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.