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

Doesn't include the best product

[beetle496]

They failed to review the best product available, EyeTV

Re:I thought it was unwise -

[topham]

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

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

[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.

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.

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...

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*

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.