Need recommendation for TV tuner card

[Djinn252]

Greetings... I hope that this topic isn't too far removed from the usual here, but I'm hoping that some of you might be able to provide much-sought advice.

My Compro VideoMate TV Ultra (circa 2004) started giving me trouble recently... The audio sounds like it's being played on ultra-low quality speakers. It's definitely the card; other sounds play out of the same speakers just fine, and when I connect the card's audio output directly to the speakers, it still sounds like crap.

So, I suppose it's time to replace it. I was sold on the quality of Compro's product, but finding Compro resellers is a royal pain, so I'm jumping ship.

I'm considering Hauppauge, but their array of models and features was a bit overwhelming. I'm also considering ATI, but I'm not wholly convinced that ATI intends to adequately support their TV tuner hardware. Perhaps I'm wrong on this. I don't know of any other major players in the TV tuner field.

I'm hoping that some of you might be able to recommend specific cards and (if necessary) models. Here's a list of my requirements, specs, and needs.

• * Must be PCI
  * Must be available for major resellers (NewEgg, TigerDirect, ZipZoomFly, etc.)
  * Video quality is important
  * Audio quality is less important, ordinary two-speaker stereo is fine
  * I don't need an FM radio tuner.
  * I'm running WinXP (32-bit), with no plans to upgrade to Vista.
  * PVR functionality is worthless to me. I may occasionally record video from a digital (Hi8) camera, or from a connected VCR, but I will not routinely use it to record television to my hard drive.
  * I'll be using it to pick up analog cable signals.
  * Digital support isn't important; our cable provider is downconverting our signal through 2012, and I have no plans to switch to digital before I absolutely need to switch
  * I'm in the U.S., so we're looking at NTSC, not PAL.
  * High-definition support is of NO importance; I don't have it, and don't plan to get it.
  * Must support coaxial, S-video, and RCA (red/white/yellow) inputs
  * A "breakout box" for all the connectors would be nice, but not critical.
  * I have no need for a remote control
  * I have no need for picture-in-picture
  * Closed captioning would be nice, but not critical
  * I'd like to keep the cost down

Many thanks for any suggestions.

[jman98]

The Hauppague PVR-250 or 350 (same card but the 350 has TV out, which you may not need) should do the trick. I have the PVR-350 and it's a great card.

Some caveats.
1) These cards only have 1 audio input and it's weird. I found a connector at Radio Shack that I have plugged into it and it lets me connect RCA audio cables into the connector and it works fine. It's odd to have to buy a connector yourself for the card, but it does work.
2) Note that what it records has a bug in the way the header is written. Everything will identify video you record with these cards as being Top Field First and that is WRONG! Video recorded with these 2 cards is ALWAYS Bottom Field First. ALWAYS! You won't care unless you capture at high rates and re-encode to lower ones with some kind of MPEG encoder (ie. HCEnc, CCE, TMPGenc, etc.), but if you do this, you MUST manually set the encoder to use Bottom Field First or your output will have field order problems. You'll understand what I mean if you encode TFF and look at motion.

I don't recommend the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-150 which uses a completely different chipset and is a complete crap shoot as to whether it will work or not. The 250/350 just work for everybody. The 150 works fine for some people and never works for others and nobody knows why, nor do they seem to know how to fix it if it doesn't work for you.

[Djinn252]

The Hauppague PVR-250 or 350 (same card but the 350 has TV out, which you may not need) should do the trick. I have the PVR-350 and it's a great card.

Many thanks for the info... Just so I'm clear, "TV out" would enable me to send video from the card, to an actual television, via some sort of cable... Is that correct? I can't imagine that I'd have use for this, but what sort of cable does "TV out" use?

Also, I found the 350 on NewEgg for about $140 with shipping; a little steep. No major resellers have the 250, and those smaller ones that do are charging about the same as for the 350. I was hoping to find something in the $80-100 range, if at all possible.

Some caveats.
1) These cards only have 1 audio input and it's weird. I found a connector at Radio Shack that I have plugged into it and it lets me connect RCA audio cables into the connector and it works fine. It's odd to have to buy a connector yourself for the card, but it does work.

That does kinda suck... but it's not a show stopper. I'm willing to compromise my dignity and go into a Radio Shack if necessary.

2) Note that what it records has a bug in the way the header is written. Everything will identify video you record with these cards as being Top Field First and that is WRONG! Video recorded with these 2 cards is ALWAYS Bottom Field First. ALWAYS! You won't care unless you capture at high rates and re-encode to lower ones with some kind of MPEG encoder (ie. HCEnc, CCE, TMPGenc, etc.), but if you do this, you MUST manually set the encoder to use Bottom Field First or your output will have field order problems. You'll understand what I mean if you encode TFF and look at motion.

Yikes... Again this sounds like something that would have been fixed several revisions ago, but I'm sufficiently adept with video conversion that I can correct the field order.

... I don't recommend the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-150 which uses a completely different chipset and is a complete crap shoot as to whether it will work or not. The 250/350 just work for everybody. The 150 works fine for some people and never works for others and nobody knows why, nor do they seem to know how to fix it if it doesn't work for you.

Excellent info on all counts... Most appreciated. I'm hoping a few others might chime in.

[Bodyslide]

The ATI 650 is on sale for 79.99 after rebates. I have this card and will be using it to recapture some Home movies from VHS...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815306005

[jagabo]

I have a Hauppauge PVR-250. The audio connector is a standard 3.5mm stereo pin-plug. The same kind of connector that most computers use for audio inputs. You probably have a few stereo pin-plug to RCA cables sitting around the house.

The output from the PVR-350 is composite and s-video. It only plays MPEG because it uses the card's internal MPEG decoder. So you're pretty much limited to what the card records. It doesn't play AVI files downloaded from the net, for example.

Contrary to jman98's experience, my PVR-250 has always recorded top field first.

[Djinn252]

The Hauppauge PVR-250 sounds nice, but again - it's not available from major resellers, and I doubt it can be had for under $100.

Meanwhile, the ATI 650 linked above would normally be a viable candidate, but the reviews are terrible. Again, I have concerns that ATI isn't really supporting their TV tuner hardware.

Can anyone tell me whether this card will meet all my needs:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116015

[FulciLives]

The Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 and 350 are the two best choices for what you seek.

Again the only difference is that the 350 adds output which I agree is not really necessary but for whatever reasons the 350 model is fairly easy to find brand new whereas the 250 is nearly impossible to find brand new.

NEWEGG.COM does indeed have the 350 for $129.99

Not a bad price at all considering it is a proven device that works and works well.

NEWEGG.COM link ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116609

Good Luck

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
The Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 and 350 models have a mini-plug (headphone style) for the audio. It does support stereo. To use it with standard RCA stereo plugs (the white and red plugs) you need some sort of adapter. Any of the following will work:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882021058

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882021057

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882021056

You can also find stuff like this at a RADIO SHACK store.

[hunter99]

Neal:
Quick test. If closed caption works, fields are OK.
Have the 350, works great.

good luck
George

[jagabo]

Can anyone tell me whether this card will meet all my needs:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116015

Yes, the HVR-1800 should work for you. I'm not sure how image quality compares to the PVR-250/350. I believe it uses software compression rather than hardware. So CPU load will be higher and A/V sync errors more likely. You might also consider the HVR-1250, the single tuner version.

[usually_quiet]

Can anyone tell me whether this card will meet all my needs:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116015

Yes, the HVR-1800 should work for you. I'm not sure how image quality compares to the PVR-250/350. I believe it uses software compression rather than hardware. So CPU load will be higher and A/V sync errors more likely. You might also consider the HVR-1250, the single tuner version.

I checked the specs at Hauppauge's website. The encoding of analog to MPEG-2 is definitely done via hardware. I don't think digital is re-encoded, since HD isn't made DVD compliant, just recorded (as a transport stream perhaps?).

Somebody at the AV forum wrote that the chip which converts analog to MPEG-2 is the same one as used in the PVR-150.

[jagabo]

Ah, OK -- analog compression is hardware. The 1250 is definitely software (I have one). And yes, ATSC/QAM digital tuner data is simply saved in a file, not reencoded.

[Zen of Encoding]

I've asked this before and I'm *sure* I'll bring it up again,

Does ANY CARD being recommended here in this thread have component inputs (red, blue, green).
If we're going to record Hi-def (1080i) content, than this seems to be the most commonly used output
on satellite and cable boxes, yet it seems to be a VERY rare feature on reasonably priced cards. Why?

[jagabo]

Blackmagic Intensity Pro and Hauppauge HD PVR have HD component in.

[edDV]

I've asked this before and I'm *sure* I'll bring it up again,

Does ANY CARD being recommended here in this thread have component inputs (red, blue, green).
If we're going to record Hi-def (1080i) content, than this seems to be the most commonly used output
on satellite and cable boxes, yet it seems to be a VERY rare feature on reasonably priced cards. Why?

Why is twofold.

1. Analog Component (1080i high def) is wide bandwidth and difficult to capture. The BlackMagic Intensity Pro captures to uncompressed at ~ 422GB/hr. That requires a dedicated 4+ disk RAID to keep up. It offers the option to software encode to MJPEG but the resulting file size is still very large depending on the compression your CPU and single disk can handle. This is not what you want for typical PVR use. Better to use the IEEE-1394 port (~7-9GB/hr.) for the channels that remain unblocked. The Hauppauge HD PVR hardware encodes analog component to h.264 which needs a fast computer CPU+GPU for playback and is difficult to edit.

2. "They" are in the process of eliminating the "analog hole" ASAP so expect YCbCr out to be more difficult to get in the near future. "They" want you on protected HDMI.

[jagabo]

Oh, there's also some Japanese card called the Monster X.

Files from the Hauppauge HD PVR are a bit difficult to edit at this point in time. If you have a graphics card with hardware h.264 decoding (and software that supports it) you don't need a very powerful CPU. There are a few threads here about this card.

[vhelp]

I've been around here for many years now, since 2001, and tried just about everything there in on the market, at least within my price < $300 range.

I started out basically with the Pinnacle Studio DC10Plus card and used that for several years in conjunction with other capture cards. But the limited NTSC 640x480 resolution was not enough for actual video from my satellite and analog video needs. So, I jeorneyed onward in other cards over the years.

The advc-100/110/55/ and so on are great Analog to Digitial (DV format) devices. But they don't incorporate any tv tuners. But, you can feed your vcr to it and it will do just fine.

I would have suggested the ATI TV Wonder, an old contender. I still have it laying around. It does very well for brand, but some people can never get it or any ATI product to work in their system. I say, its a matter of tracking down the culprit(s) that are (were) causing problems installing an ATI product. So far, if memory serves me well, I've never had any trouble that I can complaine about w/ respect to ATI products. And I recently purchased an ATI TV Wonder (VE) card, a pci card because it imho was prob the last of its kind to hit the shelves in stores. That was a year ago. I knew it was prob its last show. And, being that it was the last one on the shelf, I grabbed it. I got for those reasons plus I knew that I could get it to work right out of the box and into my newer Win XP Home Edition system (at the time) and it did.

Another great thing about the ATITVW is that it ignores macrovision.

So yeah, I would go with one of the pci ATI TV Wonder modles if they are still around on the shelves. Another great contender is the Winfast TV 2000 Expoert XP card. This is another pci type card and does a really good job. Has pic-in-picture, though you don't particulary care for that feature, and does a superb job at laserdisc capture, bringing in a clean picture. In fact, I even made a recent post about this card used with laserdisc transfer. You can find that in one of the off topic posts. Anyway. It has a super 2-d comb filter for composite and is especially great for laserdisc. I don't think you mentioned laserdisc projects, but just in case..

Another great thing about the above mentioned Winfast card is that it too also ignores macrovision.

Currently, I'm using my Pinnacle Studio AV/DV card inside my Win XP Home edition computer. It serves as my main analog capture system, and is noise-free, thanks to a power strip with AC Line and Coax noise filter cicuitry built in. I've been using this setup for the last year or so. And I mainly use the Cedocida DV codec, a 5:1 compression ratio, in most of my capture projects except for when I need absolute quality (detail and no macroblocks/pixelation) I use the Lagarith codec, a 2:1 compression ratio, and if I do laserdisc, I use my Winfast card (above) for that medium, and so on.

There's so much to mention but I can't remember every aspect nor detail of it all. So this is as much info I can give you at the moment. Hope it helps.

Now, for VHS work, I've come to the conclusion that anything MPEG and DV type hardware capture devices just don't cut it enough for me. I can still see macroblocks and/or pixelation in the captures. I don't get it why most people don't see it then say that vhs looks great with these. VHS has a lot of random noise, otherwise refered to as Salt N Pepper noise, and with virtually no way to lock on it for removal. It is some internal aspect of the analog signals that relates to the cable (RF) signal that produces these SnP noise (or chroma noise) in the recorded video and the vcr records these permanently. So when you capture from your vcr (or directly from your analog cable tv) you get these SnP noise. Later, once recorded to tape, you then have an additional problem to deal with, the issues that relate to vcr's limited range in distributing the original video detail. Sorry, the terms escape me. All I am trying to say here is that you are better off capturing with an straight analog capture card with a huffy or lagarith or raw codec in order to obtain the highest quality and close to original detail as possible. A MPEG / DV hardware capture card is just not enough for this type of source video, imho. And then, there I go saying that I use the cedocida dv codec in most of my captures. Oh well. That's how it goes. But I woudn't use it especially in vhs capture projects.

I would say that the only time when an MPEG / DV hardware capture card/device is good is when the source is from the digital domain, as in digital cable or satellite. These sources do not have the noise mentioned above and they produce virtually near original source detail. But analog noise is not recommended for these cards.

-vhelp 4783

[Djinn252]

Ok... So if the HVR 1800 ($100) will work for me, is there any reason that I should spend the extra money for the PVR 350 ($130)? Is there any advantage to the more expensive model? If not, what is Hauppauge's logic in charging more for what appears to be an older, inferior card?

(Links for quick reference)
HVR 1800
PVR 350

[jagabo]

The PVR-350 has TV out (only for playing MPEG files), the HVR-1800 doesn't.

[edDV]

Ok... So if the HVR 1800 ($100) will work for me, is there any reason that I should spend the extra money for the PVR 350 ($130)? Is there any advantage to the more expensive model? If not, what is Hauppauge's logic in charging more for what appears to be an older, inferior card?

(Links for quick reference)
HVR 1800
PVR 350

The 350 is SD but has more work to do (encoding and decoding). The 1800 is an HD ATSC/QAM tuner that grabs pre-encoded MPeg2 (from the broadcaster) and puts it on disk. It also tunes and encodes NTSC SD to MPeg2 in hardware (like the PVR150).

The difficult part comes later with HD. You need to be able to play it and edit it.

[DarrellS]

Does ANY CARD being recommended here in this thread have component inputs (red, blue, green).
If we're going to record Hi-def (1080i) content, than this seems to be the most commonly used output
on satellite and cable boxes, yet it seems to be a VERY rare feature on reasonably priced cards. Why?

ATI has a new All In Wonder card. The ATI All-in-Wonder HD. It's a combination of the HD3650 (but faster) and the TV Wonder 650. It has component output from an HD accessory kit but I don't believe it has component input. It does have HDMI input. It supports MPEG2, MPEG4, VC-1 and H264 encoding. It only supports QAM tuning using Vista with the ATI Catalyst Media Center. It sells for around $200.

[FulciLives]

The Hauppauge PVR 350 is proven to work and work well.

If the HDR 1800 uses the same chipset as the Hauppauge PVR 150 then it is garbage for analog capture. The 150 sucked donkey balls.

I wouldn't get the 1800 if analog capture is important to you.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman