TV cards

Smithy · 12 Oct 2009 at 22:34

Hi,

I'm looking for a TV card for my brother. Features must include;

Be able to receive Freeview channels
Remote Control
Be able to record

I was looking at the WinTV-HVR1300 from the Hauppauge range. Are there any better cards for the money?

danny_mac · 12 Oct 2009 at 22:53

Im not overly clued up on the subject, but i have a Hauppauge T500 pci card.

Its a dual tuner so you can watch and record at the same time. It came with a remote that is good. I use with MCE and have no issues.

Smithy · 13 Oct 2009 at 09:47

I noticed that the HVR1100 is cheaper but seems to be able to do all that the 1300 can.

Some have said stay away from Hauppauge altogether. So there's also the Terratec Cinergy 2400i, which features a double tuner so that you can record one thing while watching another.

The Terratec is looking the favourite so far.

MumboJumbo · 13 Oct 2009 at 12:27

compro were the tv cards to get for vista when i got mine about 2 years ago. Well they had the best drivers. The likes of hauppauge were clueless considering vista had been out over a year and wintv ive had problems with in the past.

Compro do seem to make good cards though, at least i never had any trouble with mine. Picks up more channels then the tv. Well i say that, my windows media center is now corrupt so i cant use it for anything so i cant watch tv either on it now.

jbloggs · 13 Oct 2009 at 14:28

Smithy said:
I noticed that the HVR1100 is cheaper but seems to be able to do all that the 1300 can.

Some have said stay away from Hauppauge altogether. So there's also the Terratec Cinergy 2400i, which features a double tuner so that you can record one thing while watching another.

The Terratec is looking the favourite so far.

I have the Terratec Cingery 2400i DT (which can be picked up for just over £50), have it running under XP, but have also used it with Windows 7 MediaCenter (which I will do again in a week or so) without any problems, have used it to record quite a lot and put into Divx to play from USB stick on standalone DVD player...

Smithy · 14 Oct 2009 at 15:17

It turns out my brother does not have a spare PCIe (x1 or otherwise) slot on his motherboard, so the Terratec is rules out.

I'm now thinking the Hauppauge T500 is the best choice, particularly for its dual receiver feature.

ash_scotland88 · 14 Oct 2009 at 15:50

just to say iam looking into this as well.
Running win7...thats if I cant get my iptv to work.

nikebee · 14 Oct 2009 at 16:02

8igdave said:
compro were the tv cards to get for vista when i got mine about 2 years ago. Well they had the best drivers. The likes of hauppauge were clueless considering vista had been out over a year and wintv ive had problems with in the past.

Compro do seem to make good cards though, at least i never had any trouble with mine. Picks up more channels then the tv. Well i say that, my windows media center is now corrupt so i cant use it for anything so i cant watch tv either on it now.

Just to clarify this, Hauppauge's drivers only worked in Vista 32bit, and this came after about 6months or so from the Vista release.

It took them an age to get stable 64bit drivers out.

I'd been a longtime user of the HVR 1300 before moving to the Compro E900F Dual Tuner and couldn't have been happier with both if I'm honest.

Smithy · 14 Oct 2009 at 16:10

nikebee said:
I'd been a longtime user of the HVR 1300 before moving to the Compro E900F Dual Tuner and couldn't have been happier with both if I'm honest.

Taking my needs into account, would there be any reason to go for the HVR 1300 model over the Nova-TD 500 model? Is there any reason why the HVR 1300 is £20 more?

nikebee · 14 Oct 2009 at 16:20

None at all really mate, I'd go for the TD-500 myself as it's a dual tuner and the quality is supposed to be quite good. The HVR1300 is a single tuner but is a hybrid so it can do Analogue and Digital.... there's no point paying for the hybrid since Analogue is turned off here and is being turned off in the rest of the UK over the next few months.