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Hardware MPEG2 TV Tuners Compared
EconolineCrush writes "The Tech Report has put together an intriguing comparison of TV tuner cards with hardware MPEG2 acceleration from ATI, eVGA, and Hauppauge. The article examines CPU utilization for typical PVR tasks and highlights some very apparent image quality differences between the three cards. Testing was apparently done with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, but does anyone have experience with the cards in MythTV?"
...and for those who don't want to sift through 11 pages of ads and Flash:
Overall, it's hard to come up with a verdict. The PVR-150MCE l.p. is easy to discount due to its comparatively poor image quality. Although the TV Wonder Elite has great image quality, works flawlessly, and comes with a swanky remote, it costs twice as much as the competition. The eVGA NVTV, which also has low CPU utilization and great image quality, runs only $62 online and comes bundled with the NVDVD decoder, making it perfect for Media Center Edition and thus our Editor's Choice. Just keep in mind that if you have an Athlon 64 system with a VIA chipset, you might want to avoid the NVTV until NVIDIA resolves its issues with that platform.
I have a Hauppauge PVR250 (non MCE) and a Sapphire Theatrix 550 (new ATI chipset).
I've tried both MythTV and MCE2005.
Frankly I think the IQ on both of these cards is quite poor. If you fiddle with various settings/parameters you can achieve a "passable" picture quality at best.
I was really hyped when I heard about the ATI 550 chipset thinking finally I would get some decent IQ but alas, more of the same mushy looking crap.
As it stands now I'm just making due until something truly worthwhile finally comes out.
- Toby