Which Aussie Digital TV Tuner Card

[mikesbytes]

With Digital TV Tuner Cards dropping under AU$200 and the ability to dump mpeg2 straight to the hard drive, it looks like I should get one. If I get one, it will only be for free to air, I'm not interested in satilite.

1. What should you look for in an Australian Digital TV card? Does anyone have a recommendation?
2. Is the MPEG2 received within the specification for MPEG2 on a DVD? IE reencoding is not required?

[dilligaf]

Ive been using the Dvico Fusion HDTV Lite card for a day, set up was easy. Install the card drivers before the hardware, plug in the USB remote IR then install these drivers. Do a auto channel search & its done. The lite version does not have the analog input capture ability the full version card has, no biggie to me.
The captured stream is huge about 1.5Gb for the 15 min test I did, it depends on the bitrate of the transmission. Im yet to demux & encode to dvd compliant mpeg stream but I have been told to expect a few warnings messages from Tmpgenc re: GOP length. The also occurs with output from the Topfield standalone box so it must be a feature of the transmitted stream.
Bought my Lite card from www.eyo.com.au for $165, $185 for the full version card (which is now called Dvico Ultraview)

[tweedledee]

If the computer is near a TV, is it effective to run a cable from a TV out to the TV? has anyone tried it? and how did it look?
Also does the card have AV cable for a out signal?

[dilligaf]

Afaik there is no video out on either Dvico card (mine has'nt) so output to a TV relies on your video card.

Checkout http://forums.dvbowners.com/

[mikesbytes]

dilligaf wrote

The captured stream is huge about 1.5Gb for the 15 min test I did, it depends on the bitrate of the transmission.

Thanks dilligaf, sounds like you can't be 100% sure that the digital transmission source matches DVD specs. If I had thought about it, it would of been clear, HDTV has a higher number of lines to SDTV and DVD are designed to produce 576 lines interlaced, which is below HDTV.

[dilligaf]

I downloaded the latest drivers (2.70), found an option to capture to native mpeg. Could only try it on Ten standard definition (ABC off the air), produced a DVD compliant mpeg 720 x 576 at 6000kbs. 10mins was 450 mb in size. Loaded it into Tmpgenc Author no problems. Will try with an HD stream once I can get an HD channel with my temp. setup rabbit ears

[mikesbytes]

So, when they are transmitting SD, the video can be dumped straight to DVD and played on most (all ?) DVD players. Pehaps a few may complain about the glop structure.

I am guessing that the cards simply pass thu the mpeg2 without conversion, meaning that I would need to use a software encoder such as tpmg to make the HD become DVD compliant.

[mimwdv1]

I'm looking for a similar solution.

I'm currently using an analogue tuner card (winfast tv200 xp), saving files as MPG2, dumping them onto a CD or DVD ISO formatted disk (so *not* authoring a proper DVD), which reads fine in my modded Xbox, regardless of bitrate or resolution up to DVD quality. Due to the volume I record re-encoding each file is not an option.

Does anyone know which digital cards could do the same job? ie dump a standard MPG2 file with user-configurable resolution and/or bitrate without having to re-encode?

I'd like one with direct TV-out and HD capability, but it's not essential. My budget is similar to mikesbytes (under $200 AUD).

[SatStorm]

Australia use DVB /s
For direct capture from satellite FTA channels, a good cheap choice is the skystar 2 card. It is also capable to receive / capture Free To Air HDTV transmissions.

[chicola]

See my answer here:

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=236184&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=dvb

[mikesbytes]

dilligaf wrote

I downloaded the latest drivers (2.70), found an option to capture to native mpeg.

Dilligaf, what other formats does the card capture in?

[dilligaf]

It saves as mpeg in both cases, a .tp file (transport stream) or a .mpg file (native mpeg program stream). Ive had a couple of sync issues using both types of file capture, but womble mpeg wizard fixes these ok. I capture in mostly .tp format as it allows the choice of audio tracks (if contained in broadcast). Thus far Ive not had to re-encode any stream to be dvd-compliant, I use dvd2one to shrink the TDA authored dvd project to 4.36 Gb.