OK boys and girls, after 8 long years **Amp]/b] has finally broken down and has cable installed in his humble abode. I now find it a titanic battle between watching TV and surfing on the net so I decided to have my cake and eat it too. I want to get a TV tuner card and need some recommendations since I have never shopped for them before. Looking for one that can also act as a DVR and have some kind of Tivo listing system. Computer specs are as follows:
Athalon XP 2000+
80 GB HD
512 MB RAM DDR PC 2700
Win XP Pro
I have the el-cheapo ATI All-in-Wonder TV Card installed in my machine. When I bought it, I didn’t notice that it wasn’t XP compatible (I’m running XP Pro, BTW). I slapped it in, installed the software, and discovered that it scrambled my system something fierce. I ended up yanking the card out, doing a total reinstall of XP, and then I downloaded the XP compatible drivers from their website, slapped the card back in, and managed to get everything to work.
No complaints, really, other than my own stupidity and that the channel guide software doesn’t seem to realize that I get The History Channel, for some strange reason.
Most TV cards in that range are about the same in terms of quality. You may want to look for one with WDM drivers, as those tend to drop fewer frames. I use the Leadtek TV2000XP card. I think the WinTV line uses WDM drivers now, too.
The quality you get out of a recorded show can range from really crappy (e.g. pixelated, visually noisy, low sound) to pretty damn sweet-looking, based on a number of variables (ranked in approximate order of importance, with 1 being the most important) :
Are you encoding directly to MPEG-2 or some other highly compressed codec at the same time you’re capturing? If so, your computer won’t be able to take the time it needs to do its calculations optimally. Your resultant video will be substandard. Solution? Capture with a semi-lossless codec like HuffyUV, then re-encode as MPEG or MPEG-2. With your computer, I’d guess it would take about 1.5x the length of the video to encode to MPEG-1, and 2-3x (or more, if you go crazy with multipass VBR) the length for MPEG-2.
How is the video getting in to your computer? If you run the coaxial TV cable right into the card, you’ll be using the card’s built-in tuner. This is bad because there is a lot of electro-magnetic interference inside a computer and TV tuner cards are poorly shielded from it. If you use the card’s tuner, your picture will be significantly more grainy than if you run your coax into a VCR (or digital cable box) and run RCA cables out from there to your computer. Of course, with this method, you’ll have to change channels with your VCR, but it does produce much better results.
How much are you willing to read? High quality recording via TV card can be a fairly complicated subject. The more you learn, the better (and faster) your results will be. There are frighteningly expensive programs for this sort of thing, but you can accomplish the process entirely with freeware and still get really good results. Read the tutorials and forums at DVDRhelp.com for more info. They also have capture card reviews on the site.
If you want TIVO-like capabilities and program listings, you’ll have to run the coax straight in to the computer and sacrifice some quality. You’ll need DVR software. Showshifter is one popular choice, but it costs $50. There are a few free DVR programs, but I’ve never tried them. There’s also TitanTV, a free service that claims to integrate program listings with your DVR software. I’ve never tried it, so I can’t vouch for it. I do all of my recording the slow, high-quality way.
I may be overstating the quality issues, too. The differences are pretty obvious and distracting to me, but a lot of people do everything the easiest way and end up with a recording that’s acceptable to them. YMMV.
Ah, here is one just came up on sale at circuit city instore or dotcom, $99 after rebate:
Hauppauge Personal Video Recorder
The WinTV® Personal Video Recorder brings live TV to your PC screen. With its 125-channel cable ready TV receiver, you can watch TV in a resizable window or full screen while you work on your PC. You can turn your PC into a Digital TV recorder, and watch and record those TV shows with instant replay and program pause. Plus, you can burn your home videos and favorite TV shows onto CD-ROMs or DVDs and play them on your home DVD player.
I’ve been very happy with my ATI 8500 DV, and it has performed quite well in all aspects, running under XP Pro. Although, at $164, it’s not the cheapest option out there. The only downside I have experienced was that the drivers can be a bit of a chore to upgrade.
