TV cards and HDTV

Joe42

Joe42

Joe42

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I'm in the process of getting together a media centre pc, and i want a dual digital tuner card for recieving freeview.

Can all digital freeview tuners recieve HD broadcasts over freeview, such as the BBC HD channel which is currently being tested using freeview?

Will all freeview tuners also recieve the 5.1 sound thats part of an HD broadcast?

I believe that when analogue is switched off those channels will be used in conjunction with the current digital freeview channels to provide enough bandwidth for HD broadcasting, this suggests that i might need a new tv card for recieving HD over freeview that 'knows' which channels are which.
Or will this be done via a firmware update at the time via the dedicated engineering channel that does this?

I'm completely new to this stuff and finding it a bit of a minefield.

Thanks for your help.
 
A few more questions...

If i were to use a Digital Satelite card such as the WinTV-NOVA-S-Plus could i use two with windows mce?

Or could i use both a dual tuner freeview card and a satelite card with mce?

Do i have to buy a software decoder such as nvidia dvd decoder?
 
Could a Don move this over to General Hardware as no-one here seems to be able to help.

Another question...

-How does interactive tv work, does it use the internet with a modem in the freeview box?
 
Nebula DigiTV currently has some beta software to try that BBC HDTV broadcast, however due to the bandwith it'll only work if you're close to the crystal palace transmitter. If you check their website it says itll support HDTV once its being broadcasted.

Slightly more expensive card but definitely recommend for the software you get and their support :)
 
I've been doing a lot of reading on this, apparently the bbc hd broadcast is mpeg 4 rather than teaming up several channels, which means they must be giving viewers in the crystal palace area a 'box' which can decode mpeg4, or they are giving them media centre pcs with those tuners in or even a normal tuner and decoding via software.

It seems the way most broadcasters are trialing hd over dvb-t is using mpeg4 with the disadvantage of more power being needed by the 'box' at the viewers end to decode it, rather than teaming up 2 or more channels and wasting precious bandwidth.

Which means a media centre pc could probably decode it via software in future when it becomes available, without the need for an more advanced hardware mpeg4 decoder in the tv tuner card.
 
People on the freeview trial got set top boxes.

However lots of people also put their media PC's to task and have been watching BBC HD and ITV HD for the past few months (mainly for the world cup of course).

If you head over to www.avforums.com there is loads of info about the set-ups people have used. You need a beefy PC and the right combination of codecs as well as being close to Crystal Palace.
 
Thanks, i've answered all my questions now really.

Just trying to choose between these 3 tuners:

• Fusion HDTV DVB-T Dual Freeview Digital PCI TV Tuner Card
• Terratec Cinergy 2400iDT MCE edition (Dual Tuner - PCI Express)
• Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T-500

Any idea if any one is better than the others?
I'm going to read up on it in a moment but any general opinions would be appreciated.

One more thing, do i need dvd decoder software for mce?
 
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It's not really my area of knowledge, I'm fortunate enough to have a TV Drive so have no interest in the cards. Hauppage is the one I've heard mentioned the most.

I would assume that MCE comes with DVD decoder since it's designed to be an out of the box solution that Joe Public can pick up from a PC superstore.

Even if it didn't there are free ones around and you'd only need to install an old copy of PowerDVD.

The basic Nvidia decoder is only about £12, fine for using SPDIF.
 
Goatboy said:
It's not really my area of knowledge, I'm fortunate enough to have a TV Drive so have no interest in the cards. Hauppage is the one I've heard mentioned the most.

I would assume that MCE comes with DVD decoder since it's designed to be an out of the box solution that Joe Public can pick up from a PC superstore.

Even if it didn't there are free ones around and you'd only need to install an old copy of PowerDVD.

The basic Nvidia decoder is only about £12, fine for using SPDIF.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately you need to get your own decoder :( nVidia Purevideo (DVD) decoder seems to be the best one to use (I've tried several).

I'm using 2x Leadtek DTV1000 -Ts and they're pretty good; pretty sure they support HDTV/AC3 as well. Much better than my Compro DVB T-200.
 
Couple more questions.

Apparently mce can talk to set top boxs and work with them, how?

Is it possible to put a small disk in the mce box and record tv direct to a network folder on a fileserver?

Is there an option to choose where it puts the file for pausing tv like there is for pagefiles?

What does it record tv as, mpeg 2 files?

Thanks
 
Another question...

Any idea if its possible to get dts neo6 on windows media player?
I have it on creative mediasource.
 
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