External TV Tuners/PVR Devices Tested

Solomon writes "TV Tuners for the PC have existed for a long time but with the ever increasing popularity of TiVo-like services and the possibility of replicating such features on your Windows PC with little effort and a small investment, tuners have been getting a lot of attention this year. Today there's three-way shootout posted at TechSpot with products from Digistor, Transcend and a very appealing offer from RTV called the VEG that lets you play consoles in your monitor. Although neither of these devices can match TiVo completely, they do give you a very cheap alternative."

Comments

this is a narrow target market

[ccbutler]

not a bad little roundup... however as someone who is seriously in the market for a value ended PVR, i would have like to have seen a comparison with a hardware Mpeg2-encoded PVR in the mix.

The author mensions the word 'quality' quite a few times... some hardware encoded screenies would have been a good way to measure those statements.

TV tuners

[basic0]

I was interested in TV tuners and PVR software and so forth for a while, but then I realized that being able to watch and record TV on my computer still does nothing to improve the actual content that passes for entertainment on TV.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

[Andy Dodd]

One aspect of the review mentioned the Indeo codec for one of the devices.

There was also no mention whatsoever of hardware MPEG2 encoding.

If it doesn't encode MPEG2 in hardware, it's not worth buying. Period.

Cheap?

[voidptr]

Although neither of these devices can match TiVo completely, they do give you a very cheap alternative

How cheap is it really going to be by the time you've added everything up.

A dual tuner DirecTV tivo with 80 hours space is $100 and $5 a month covers up to 8 of them on an account.

I doubt you can get a pc with sufficient horsepower, storage, and a couple of these capture dongles for that.

Re:Cheap?

[enrico_suave]

you're comparing oranges and apricots here.

They are comparing a STB box tivo for analog cable with one of these... besides, what self respecting geek doesn't have a spare hand me down PC laying around... to throw a tuner/capture card in?

FWIW the best benefit to building a PC based PVR isn't cost/subscription savings... it's CONTROL over the content. No one is going to be expiring six feet under DVR recordings without my consent on my PC DVR.

*shrug*