choosing a tv tuner card >> help

[bluraid]

hi am new here. this is a wonderfull site , learned a lot from this site. ..

heres my problem, i am looking to buy a tv tuner card ( my first ). i dont have any experience in this field..googled a lot and finally found two cards a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 and Leadtek TV2000XP/EXPERT ..but am not sure which one to buy ...plz help

[jsmithepa]

hauppauge 250 - solid like arock. Supported by everybody. The epson of TV capture.

Does analog (only) and outputs to MPEG-2 (directly compat DVD no re-encoding required).

DOES NOT record digital cable, DOES NOT output to DIVX (if u have such need).

[edDV]

What do you what this tuner card to do?

Just watch TV on the computer monitor?
Do you want it to record to hard disk? What format? Burn DVD?

What channels do you want to tune?
Over the air?
Cable Analog?
Digital broadcasts?

[bluraid]

i want to connect my cable tv's cable and watch tv !yes i aslo want to record it to hard disk. burn dvd..everything !!

edit: i dont want to buy an expensive card now . .

[mike909]

if you want dual tuner, happauge 500mce

[SingSing]

hauppauge 250 = $134

[edDV]

hauppauge 250 = $134

Or the PVR USB2 model. Sometimes cheaper but get the correct PAL model for India. Channel frequencies differ by country.

The key issue is to buy an encoding model. You will want that.

[AlecWest]

hi am new here. this is a wonderfull site , learned a lot from this site. ..

heres my problem, i am looking to buy a tv tuner card ( my first ). i dont have any experience in this field..googled a lot and finally found two cards a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 and Leadtek TV2000XP/EXPERT ..but am not sure which one to buy ...plz help

I use the PVR150 and couldn't be happier. And on watching cable and capturing at the same time from a "different" channel goes, I solved that problem with a simple RF splitter. But, I have "basic cable" so I don't need a converter box. The cable comes out of my wall and into the splitter. My splitter is a 3-way splitter. One output cable goes to my Hauppauge capture card, one goes to my TV, and one goes to my cable modem.

BTW, whichever capture card you buy, if it captures MPEG2 on the fly and you're capturing stuff to burn to single-layer DVDs, check out my video bitrate cheatsheet:

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=309331

[drewzor]

DONT BUY LEADTEK
I have the DVT2000H and its been a nightmare!

I recommend a HDD DVD recoder standalone and then you can rip the dvd to pc and do what you like!

Tuner cards drop frames and audio sync is a common issue
My experience is having to re-encode, split, sync, combine and convert back to mpg.. hours of F#'n around
Hopeless peace of.... Leadtek offer no support to their buggy software aswell
Obviously tho some people have had success with TunerCards but in most cases it renders your computer useless while recording.
Which ever way you go, I hope it works well for you.