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

wow

[confusion]

With all the spam in here its starting to remind me of my inbox.

Anyway, I have a 9600 all-in-wonder, and I really really like the cable tv tuner deal. I desperately need to upgrade, but I am having a hard time parting with the built in tuner. I suppose these would be a good alternative.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

Re:wow

[wizbit]

leaving 4 local channels in HD. CBS, NBC, FOX and some other crap.

I'd have written it, "CBS, NBC, ABC, and some other crap," but, to each his own. :)

I thought it was unwise -

[thewldisntenuff]

...to use USB tv tuners. Arent there problems with moving all that video across the USB interface? I remember talk about making an Xbox run Myth off a usb tuner, and it was quickly denounced as impossible....I heard the same thing about a laptop and a WinTV USB hauppauge tuner....

So? Is this true?

-thewldisntenuff

Re:I thought it was unwise -

[topham]

USB 2.0 has sufficient bandwidth if the device performs onboard encoding. (MPEG2 for instance).

Re:I thought it was unwise -

[Schmucky The Cat]

A USB full speed (1.1) interface is good enough if the USB device has it's own electronics to compress the signal or if it is just forwarding an already compressed signal.

A USB high speed (2.0) interface is good enough by itself.

Be careful

[exhilaration]

...of any external tuner that claims to let you play console games. *Every* external tuner I've seen has had too much lag to let you play console games.

Doesn't include the best product

[beetle496]

They failed to review the best product available, EyeTV

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.

Notes from A MythTV User

[drewzhrodague]

DO your research FIRST, and just buy a PVR-250 or PVR-350. Friend of mine didn't listen to me, and went and bought himself a cheap $29 tuner card for $180 -- and no MPEG.

I have an old non-mpeg tuner card, and it works great with MythTV. Dedicate a box to the task. Get a nice TV-Out card that you can live with. Get the remote control, or a longer-range wireless keyboard.

MythTV blows my mind everytime I use it: KnoppMyth

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[JaffaKREE]

and went and bought himself a cheap $29 tuner card for $180

Wow, you really need to sit your friend down and have a talk with him.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[MrTaz65]

Or sell him something :)

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[wizbit]

Chipset is similar, I believe. The 250s (and the "Media Center Edition" 250s) add additional inputs - I believe the 150 only has S-Video and a tuner - and a remote on the non-MCE model. The 350 adds its own tv-out (though it's a bit of a pain to get working properly) and can do nice things like re-interlace the tv signal so your set gets the extra niceties like closed-captioning, and better picture quality from what I've heard. The 350 is up around $150-170 if memory serves.

They're not great gamer cards, btw, so you might be better off looking at an nvidia chipset if you want to play games on your homebrew pvr.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[Al Al Cool J]

A few weeks ago, I picked up a Hauppauge PVR-250 which I'm using with MythTV. It all works great, except when it comes time to burn to DVD. It turns out that the variable bitrate mpeg2 streams that the Hauppauge PVR-250/350 cards put out aren't fully compliant (or at least not using the latest linux ivtv drivers). This isn't a problem during playback, but when you want to convert to DVD format using standard tools like transcode/mpeg2desc and mplex, the audio and video drift out of sync.

It took me quite a bit of googling and trial and error to figure out how to deal with the problem. (short answer: replex; longer answer: get mythtvburn and see how it does it). If I'd known about this going in, I would have spent more time researching other hardware options.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[JWW]

You know, you can modify the bitrate and capture resolution for the 250's, its not a constant setting. You can configure it from inside myth.

I've used avidemux2 to edit out commercials and have burned that content to DVD just fine.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[timeOday]

The PVR 350 is not worth it to me until Hauppauge gets off its butt and makes the video decompression work under linux.

I go the $29 route myself. In fact my computer is recording a show at this moment. I don't see the point of paying $150 for a hardware compressor when a CPU powerful enough to do the job costs half of that. Plus I can use any new gee-whiz codec that comes along.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[Al Al Cool J]

Unfortunately it's not a simple matter of bitrate or resolution. My understanding is that the 250 uses noncompliant PTS information in the mpeg2 stream, and that this can cause sync errors. Not everybody experiences it, and it seems to be more of a problem with encoding from VHS rather than from the tuner. I've found the problem using the tuner as well as s-video from a cable box as the source, and when I use replex on the stream, it complains about masses of PTS errors.

I haven't tried avidemux2 (I don't have time for editing or transcoding) but I'm guessing whatever it does to the file corrects the glitches.

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.

Re:DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

[steve_bryan]

"... us lucky people in Europe can receive MPEG2 streams over the air using DVB tuner cards, no encoding necessary"

The lucky people in the USA can get our MPEG2 streams free with an antenna and OTA HD tuner. But awareness of this capability is still quite limited. It seems as though the cable and satellite companies have succeeded in convincing most people that HD is only available by paying a monthly fee.

Do it cheaper/better with Linux?

[EvilGrin666]

Its a shame they didn't compare these products against MythTV. I've been using it quite happily for some time on my Linux box equipped with a Hauppage TV card. I suspect it works out cheaper than the options offered in the article and has comparable features to a tivo...

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?

[spicydragonz]

With Myth TV on a pc you can then edit/burn/email shows/clips to people. Also since the system is next to your stereo you might as well just play your mp3 collection. Plus since most people have "extra" Pcs around you can use one old PC as a Myth box for cost savings.

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*

yuck

[enrico_suave]

could they pick some of the crappiest cheeziest bunch of external tuners to test?

What about hauppauge wintv usb 2 or plextor convertX PVR (which has both PC and Mac pvr software)

For internal devices I like the wintv pvr250. Yes the pvr150 is cheaper and comes with a better remote/ir blaster, but the pvr250 is better supported in linux with the ivtv drivers being pretty mature/stable for that card.

*shrug*

rampy

Use Firewire then.

[SeaFox]

I don't know what's available on the PC for this. It is known that USB really isn't up to the requirements for streaming video. On the Mac side there the new El Gato EyeTV 500. The choice in Firewire is mostly because it is required for HD video streaming, not to alleviate some USB silliness.

PVR-150 does not work with MythTV.

[yet another coward]

The PVR-150 does not work with the ivtv driver or Myth. It is close to working. According to the mailing list, the audio does not work yet. One developer reported a solution. He has not rolled his code back into the main driver yet.

I hope the PVR-500 becomes supported by ivtv. It has two tuners on a single card, a great gain for people building compact MythTV systems.

Be very careful when purchasing hardware for MythTV. It is a fantastic package, but only with the right hardware.

Re:OS X support?

[yet another coward]

Here is the best chance. If any company makes such a product, El Gato is the one.

Just bought me a TiVo

[DavidD_CA]

I just picked up a $199 (after rebate) TiVo from Best Buy.. the 80 gig model. Add to the $199 the cost of lifetime subscription to TiVo's programming service ($299).

So yeah $500 is a lot for a glorified VCR... but I have to say that the damn thing is so easy to use it was worth it.

I set the thing up to my wireless network in minutes. Now I can stream MP3s onto it from my server. Photos too.

Sure you can piece your own together using MPEG decoder cards and free (or not) software, but you're gonna spend more time tinkering than you would watching TV. And if you include the price of your computer, you're gonna spend a lot more than the $500 that I did.

Not to mention the thing will never lock up, get a virus, or need to be reinstalled.

DVB or nothing

[Nik13]

I must say I used to do that analog capturing stuff, but even with the top cards, the quality is very sub-par compared to DVB capturing. You loose a lot doing non-prefect mpeg decoding, then passed thru cheap DACs, filters, wiring (and interferences), more filters, ADC (crappy sampling), on-the-fly (not very efficient) encoding... You just loose too much quality, even with much higher file sizes. DVB just works, 100% quality - no loss at all, small file sizes, cpu loads around 1%... It's just all around better. The only thing is, of course you need to have some DVB streams available (I use DVB-S), it won't do a thing for crappy analog cable or the like (I don't know anyone who still uses that).

If not, I'd get a satellite set-top box/PVR dealie. For 300$ cdn, you get one with a 80gb HD in it. It works *out of the box*. No OS install, no patching/upgrading/rebooting, no drivers needed, no setting up the remote control manually for your apps, no codecs required, no PVR software to install, no BSODs, none of that - plug it and it works. And just like DVB capturing, it's lossless (they both record the mpeg from the transportstream).

I've given up on analog capturing about 4 years ago, and I'm NEVER going back to that. I'd do OTA as well if there broadcasts in my area.