Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hardware MPEG2 TV Tuners Compared

Posted by timothy on from the baby-I'm-tuned-to-your-wavelength dept.

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?"

3 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. Is is just me, by InfallibleLies · · Score: 0, Troll

    or do all of those shots look pretty terrible?

  2. MPEG 2 compression is for the dogs. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    If picture quality is your main concern, stay AWAY
    from any card that compresses it into mpeg2 for
    you. Mpeg is lossy compression, so you're losing
    quality before you ever see the video on your screen.

    and don't get me started about transcoding after that.

    If you want the best picture quality, get a card
    with a CX23880, cx23881, or cx23883 chip on it.
    These chips spit out raw, uncompressed video.

    I suggest the MSI TV@nywhere Master.

  3. MythTV and Hauppauge 250/350 by BlakeCaldwell · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'm using the Hauppauge 250 and 350 for video inputs for MythTV, and the 350 for TV Out and hardware mpeg2 decoding. Love the cards, they're great. The ivtv drivers seem to bug out every once in a while, especially when I abuse the FFWD/RWD functions, but I gotta give it to the guys workin on the drivers - esp. Chris Kenedy, who seems to be the maintainer.