Workbug said:
I'm a little clueless on this. What new video card and application
can record HD TV on my PC? I tried something with ATI card 10 years
ago, back then it was a hassle. Is it getting any easiler?
At one time, you could get ATI AIW (All-In-Wonder) cards, which
combined a TV tuner, decoder IC, as well as a regular video card
GPU for gaming. ATI did their best, to write their own software,
so there was some semblance of a complete package solution.
Now, they're back to separating the functions. Which means, a
video card is just a video card now. You may not even get a
composite or S-video output on your video card, as the industry
tries to switch to DRM-infested digital only outputs.
TV tuners can come in different forms. Back in the day, a card
with a BT878 would connect to the PCI bus. It would come with
an NTSC or PAL tuner. When recording, you might get 20MB/sec
of uncompressed data, written out to your hard drive. (I still
use one of those cards on a daily basis. It saves turning
on the TV set. We're still using NTSC here.)
Now, you can find PCI cards, but you can also find USB
based devices. And the TV signals have changed to digital
formats. The digital stream sent, contains some kind of
MPEG content (meaning, it is compressed). The advantage of
this, is a USB2 based dongle, has enough bandwidth on the USB
cable, to record the MPEG stream to disk, without breaking
a sweat.
If you needed to bridge the old analog TV world (like I do),
as well as the newer OTA or cable digital, then you'd need
a recording device that handles multiple standards.
For example, I go to the TV tuner section here...
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=47&name=TV-Tuners-Video-Devices
and select ATSC / CleamQAM / NTSC, to be able to handle both
new digital standards and the old analog. (You can look
all those terms up on wikipedia.org if you want, to understand
what they mean.)
(This is a PCI Express x1 card, for recording TV)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116015
(This is a USB2 one. When the NTSC signal comes in, it will
be decoded, and then has to be converted by the dongle, into
a compressed format, so it better fits down the USB2 cable
without dropping frames. The dongle tend to run a bit warm,
due to some of the signal processing required.)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100035
One difference, between a PCI or PCI Express card, versus
a USB2 dongle, is the dongle may only have one TV connector
on it. If you have a cable signal, plus an OTA antenna connection,
the larger add-in cards may have the connectors you need, to allow
multiple inputs. That is one thing you'd be watching for. The
"one input dongle" is good, only if you have a single signal
source.
If you read the reviews on those, or other products, you'll find
a recurring theme is poor software. Read enough of the reviews,
to see if the users have figured out, how to get their money's worth
from the product. The solutions they use, may be a bit convoluted.
On my setup, I use an NTSC analog tuner with a BT878 chip, and
I use a copy of DScaler to control it. Excellent software. I
stopped using the Hauppauge software, years ago, after I tried
DScaler. You can waste a lot of time finding, testing, configuring
the software, to make it work right. So it can be expensive,
in terms of your personal time to get it running well. Now, if
I was to delete my copy of DScaler, I doubt I'd get it set up
exactly the same way, a second time
My channel changes are
fast, the picture quality is good, so no complaints there. As
far as I know, DScaler is specific to BT878, and isn't a general
purpose application. The reviews on Newegg, will guide you
on the best software to use with your new purchase. It might
just be Windows Media Center, but there are also separate
commercial packages that do an equivalent job (SageTV, MythTV
and so on).
Paul
