Anyways, on a budget what is the best TV Tuner card available? Let's
say I am looking to spend less than $150 or so.
Asus TV FM card
ATI TV Wonder VE
Hauppauge WinTV-GO 125 Model 700
Hauppauge WinTV-radio with dbx-TV stereo, FM radio
Ive used the ATI VE in a friends system. I have the Pinnacle Studio
Deluxe Pro and have used two bargain basement IO magic cards that
reviews said was actually a lower end generic Pinnacle card.
Most of the cards use a few of the same chips. Im not sure if there is
that much of a difference. They all seemed to work OK for my needs
when I tried capturing stuff. The real pain in the ass was the drivers
supplied by the company you buy it from. Some like the older Pinnacles
were pretty bad.
Theres a generic set of drivers you can get free - I cant remember the
url at the moment. I just installed a new MB and reinstalled WIN XP
pro. You can use those if you have one of the most common chips used.
They enable you to break free from some really awful drivers and
proprietary software that the card retailers may provide you with.
For instance - Pinnacles.
I can use tons of 3rd party software with the generic drivers with my
pinnacle card. The IO magic cards used the generic drivers in the
package and came with a 3rd party crippled version of Power VCR which
works great. For some reason Pinnacles package that you can download -
the updates - limit you to very low res. Ive read theres a fix around
that but forget what that was. Anyhow - any of the 3rd party software
like POWER VCR etc dont limit you.
Basically you have the same chips in many of the cards. With the less
than $50 you get mono sound. When you spend more you get stereo
sound, radio, remote control etc.
The only ones that are really important maybe stereo sound and
possibly hardware compression chips. It does it with hardware rather
than software. Those were a bit more expensive - $150 or so I think.
However, Ive read several sites that claim the good software like
TMPGenc and other software encoders can be of much higher quality -
though you have to have a decent system and they arent on-the-fly
encoders obviously.
The software I used to capture and record seemed OK - Power VCR .
Some do claim there are differences - like one guy posted on some site
he bought an ASUS after some other brand and it got rid of the wavy
interference patterns on some channels but thats spotty anecdotal
stuff. Some people have huge problems with all sorts of TV cards so
you wont know until you try it.
Avermedia - the cheapest stereo card at COMPUSA the last time I
checked they said didnt work with ATI radeon cards.
The ATI VE tuner my friend got - really messed up his eMAchines with a
savage video chipset. Real huge problems. I had horrendous problems
too with my Pinnacle after messing around with it for months and they
finally upgraded the drivers. But then it screwed up again so Im using
the generic drivers now.
To me - I didnt do a scientific test side by side so I maybe wrong but
- I didnt notice a big difference between the $20 IO magic , the ATI
VE and the Pinnacle studio deluxe which has remote,dbxstereo, FM radio
etc. Except for the obvious extra features and the yucky drivers
and proprietary software packages for tuners/capturing.
