ATSC tuner card that captures surround sound

[Theophilus]

Do I need to get a particular ATSC TV tuner/capture device to capture the 5.1 surround sound signal that is broadcast on some digital TV programs? For example, will a Hauppauge 1196 WinTV HVR-1250 card pass through the 5.1 audio or convert it to stereo?

[usually_quiet]

With any of the current ATSC tuner cards, the ATSC broadcast's MPEG-2 transport stream is captured as is when using the ATSC tuner on the card. No audio or video conversion takes place. The container may differ, depending on the PVR software used, but what's inside it will be exactly what was received off the air.

[edDV]

Normally an ASTC tuner tunes the broadcast by channel and subchannel, then saves the program stream as sent including the associated AC3 audio. There is no stream processing other than choosing a video and audio PID from the multiplex.

Note that many ATSC channels broadcast several subs (e.g. 2-1 2-2, 2-3) as separate PID.

[Theophilus]

Thank you!