What's the best Tv tuner card?

[Super Warrior]

I'm looking for a nice Tv tuner Pci card for my Pc,so i can mainly watch tv on my computor and do occasional decent Mpeg-2 recordings.What's the best card out there for this?

And please don't mention ATI.I used to own there ATI tv wonder card,but the software was buggy and unstable.

[Super Warrior]

Anyone

[Piccoro]

You said

And please don't mention ATI.

Thats quite a large user base and they may only have experience with ATI products (like me) rather than with other tv tuner cards. Not to mention the drivers of yesterday are not the same as today.
But im sure if you wait, others with experience in what you are asking will post.

[FulciLives]

Hello

I just got the AverTV Stereo for $49.99 at CompUSA (I'm in the USA).
So far it has been working well for me.

I've been using it mostly to capture with the end result being the creation of a DVD disc so I don't actually WATCH anything on the computer with it but I understand that it does work with the Dscaler program.

Dscaler is a program (that only works with CERTAIN capture cards) that can deinterlace the incomming video signal (which is INTERLACED) so you get a nice clean image on your computer monitor (which is PROGRESSIVE).

So, in short, no matter what capture card you end up getting make sure it works with Dscaler if you plan on using it (the capture card) to actually watch TV on the computer.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
Here is a link to the official Dscaler website:
http://www.<a class="contentlink" href="https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=257#comment...caler</a>.com/

Good Luck!

P.S.
As with most TV tuner type cards the TV tuner input on the AverTV Stereo gives crapola reception. Instead I have my cable plugged into a S-VHS VCR and then I have the A/V line out of the VCR connected to the capture card. The AverTV Stereo has a RF cable input, a regular composite video input and a S-Video input. It has the standard sound card type audio input (stereo mini-plug).

[lordsmurf]

Your old ATI is just that: old.
The best card? (Which is of course, my opinion)...
ATI ALL IN WONDER RADEON
I've got two of them, and couldn't be happier.

Other than a Matrox (macintosh-version) card, I've never used another card that I liked, including Hauppauge, Aver (worst experience yet),Pinnacle, Dazzle, and Canopus.

[FulciLives]

About the AverTV Stereo ...

I should point out that the software that comes with it is mostly garbage. It can record to either mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 but it is completely done in software and my computer is too slow to handle anything other than mpeg-1 recording. It looks OK for mpeg-1 but then again mpeg-1 sucks if you ask me hehehe

However I'm using the iuVCR program and have found that it works great. I've tried capturing with the Huffyuv AVI codec and it works wonders. Even with my slow ass P3 650Mhz 256MB WinXP Pro system I can (just barely) capture at full D1 resolutions (I've done both NTSC at 720x480 and PAL at 720x576) and it hardly drops frames ... in fact after cleaning up the HDD and defraging I get no frame drops at all in my captures.

In short I am very happy with the quality of the captures including those I've done at both full D1 and half D1 resolutions and of course the AVI file can easily be edited (I trim the start and end points and cut out commercials) and then frameserved into TMPGEnc for MPEG-2 encoding.

iuVCR has a 30 day demo mode after that I think it is only $28.00 USD or something like that (my 30 days are not up just yet but I plan on buying it and getting it registered by then).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
As I said the recording software (that comes with the card) sucks but the drivers seemed to work fine. I fooled around with the drivers that came with the package. All was fine. I then downloaded the newest drivers from the Aver website (just to be sure I had the latest) and again I've done several captures since and all is A-OK

[thayne]

I have a Hauppauge WinTV which is good for watching tv, and a Hauppauge PVR-250 which is good for recording TV. The PVR has an on-board hardware mpeg-2 encoder and can real-time encode a 12Mbps 720X480 Mpeg-2 I never set the bitrate higher than 6Mbps though. The software that comes with it is crap though, but you can get SageRecorder for only $20

[Super Warrior]

Sorry to bump this month-old thread up.I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that suggested the AverTV Tv tuner card.As i've bought the Avertv Stereo card.

I hav'ent yet tried out the recording abilites,as i mainly wanted this so i could watch TV on my Pc and so far it's been great.It was also much better and easier to install than the ATI tv wonder which required crappy updates,little tricks to get the thing working properly and several headaches in the process.

Whereas the Avertv was easy as hell to get working

[FulciLives]

Sorry to bump this month-old thread up.I just wanted to say thanks to everyone that suggested the AverTV Tv tuner card.As i've bought the Avertv Stereo card.

I hav'ent yet tried out the recording abilites,as i mainly wanted this so i could watch TV on my Pc and so far it's been great.It was also much better and easier to install than the ATI tv wonder which required crappy updates,little tricks to get the thing working properly and several headaches in the process.

Whereas the Avertv was easy as hell to get working

Glad it is working for you

I'm happy with mine

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[bgrieb]

I'm a big fan of the quality from the newest Conexant Chipset (880/881). If you wanted to get one with a tuner, the MSI TV @nywhere is a great choice for around $50 US (newegg).

BG

[jdizzy40]

Star Warrior, I'm glad to see you've got a TV Tuner card working, however I own 4 ATI AIW Cards (9800,9700,9000, and 8500DV) and two have a second ATI AIW VE card for a two TV tuner setup. All work great and I have never had to do anything but load the software that came with the card to get things running. For features and capabilities they are hard to beat. By far, the best card to record TV in MPEG-2 is the WIN PVR 250. I use this TV card in a dedicated PVR box with Snap Stream as my digital VCR. Sorry your experience with an old ATI card was not good.

[overloaded_ide]

ATI does have a few software problems, but it is not as bad as you may think. I am doing great with mine.

My problem was the Capture would do mpeg2 very well, but only at 41,000hz audio or around that, DVD is 48,000hz so some programs rejected my files as not compliant. I just downloaded the new free MMC7.5 from the ATI site and fixed that!

My other minor problem most people would not have was that my boot drive was fat32 and my editing drive was NTFS. I was running dual boot with Win98 and 2kpro. No problem with the old MMC I was using but with the new one I could capture to the boot fat32 drive fine but not to the NTFS editing drive, simple solution, do away with Win 98 and convert the boot drive to NTFS. Now I can capture to any hard drive again.

The above are the only two problems I have had, mine is an ATI AIW Radeon 7500. It works great and someday I may install the remote controll that came with the card, but for the last year I have not yet. Just hard for me to think about a remote controll for a PC!

Lots of other stuff to choose from, but ATI is not that bad! Espicially if you need a video card too. $139 last I looked and for a great capture card and video card that is not a bad price, and probably even less now.

[MrKGB]

Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Deluxe is also vey popular here, it has remote, stereo, can make mpeg2(provided you have a good machine) and costs about $50.