TV Cards

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Soldato
Joined
27 Jun 2006
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Well, to cut things short I currently have a Hauppauge WinTV PVR2 (USB) Card.

(I think this is the right forum, if not feel free to move it)

It's selective in regards to when it wants to work, the file sizes are usually huge when you apply any sort of high quality setting - and even if you do venture down the ladder into the low quality settings - the file sizes are decent, but the picture quality is far from it.

I've seen plenty of good quality videos at around 4mb/5mb - but there's no chance I can touch anything similar to that with this card.

The software is rubbish basically - and a whole ball of stuff must be downloaded/installed just to make the thing work.

And the videos that come from the card aren't compatiable with Windows Movie Maker or any other video editor that I seem to try them with.

I was just wondering what the current best card on the market is. I have looked at PCI Cards and thought they might be of more use than the USB version - but I'm not really sure.

I understand there are few competitiors to Hauppauge and from what I gather the TV Card industry isn't as big as most - but this is why I ask the question.

Cheers. :)
 
ya pci tv cards are superior.

get a hardware encoder pci tv card.

then you can record at high quality without stressing your pc.

then compress the video using winavi.
 
Nebula Digitv is the best you can get. Expensive but it turns your machine into a full freeview/recording/multimedia beastie. The software is the best thing about it.
 
Kainz said:
Nebula Digitv is the best you can get. Expensive but it turns your machine into a full freeview/recording/multimedia beastie. The software is the best thing about it.
Click to expand...

Nebula dont do mpeg 4 though do they(IE freeview HDTV)
 
Cheers, Kainz. :)

I saw a few different cards but is £100, the expensive you were talking about? Or have I went to a budget version?

Software also looks very different from what I have managed to research - but very good at the same time.

Thankfully I don't have to buy it on any sort of time schedule - so if something better was in the pipeline (i.e. mpeg4, as Frank touched on) then I could happily wait.
 
*thread resurrection music*

Sold my USB card a short while after I made this thread and never bothered replacing it - however, I think the time has come to finally replace it.

Had a look about and I like the look of the Nebula DigiTV (as suggested by Kainz) - I was just looking some opinions from anyone who may happen to have one, in regards to how it performs.

1) How good/reliable is the software? (particularly the recording element)
2) Are you given a decent range of options for file types to save as?
3) What is the difference between a half height and full height card? :confused:

I'll be using it to record television footage from (coaxial from sky box) - not to worried about picking up all sorts of freeview/hdtv channels and so on.

Thanks. :)
 
Last edited:
Strongbow said:
I bought the TerraTec Cinergy 2400i DT PCI-E 1x card from OC last week and I am very impressed. Changes channels very fast and the quality is good.

terratec
Click to expand...

much as i love these cards, they do not allow capture from an analog source.

have a look at a pinnacle analog tuner - the new (v3 i think) media center allows capture straight into divx/avi format, maybe even h264 nowadays

PCTV Analog Only Card

I have an old PCTVPro (5 years old) and it still works admirably
 
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