TV Tuner Card?

Kone

I am considering buying a TV tuner card for recording analogue (and maybe Digital) TV, can anyone recommend a decent card?

I have heard hauppauge are good but I am not sure which model to go for.

PCI would be fine with decnt recording features (and maybe a remote!)

cheers,
/Kone

Syth

I'd also be interested in buying a TV Card. Time to turn my €1,000 PC into a €50 video machine! Anyone and suggestions?

radiospan

I was searching for a good TV card for a long time before I finally bought one.

I chose a Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe in the end. There's a slightly more expensive Expert edition too. They have them here: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/TV_Cards.html

I've no complaints about it really, I use it for recording off Sky Digital via the Svideo out at the back of my Sky box. (Check that your Sky box has Svideo out) The recording software that came with it was OK, but I'm using a freeware 3rd party tool called VirtualVCR now.

It has a remote, although I don't have much use for it. It has an FM tuner, too.

Dr Bolouswki

Thats the same card as I have, and I had to reinstall my system with win 2K as the card drivers kept on crashing XP.

Do you have itinstalled on XP and if so where did you get the drivers?

BTW, that card got great reviews as being far and away the best of the budget tv cards....

vibe666

i hate to say it (well, i don't really cos it's just a gloat), but i got an old hauppauge wintv pci off ebay for £5 and it works a treat. i get perfect full screen 720 x 576 PAL capture at 25fps MJPEG on a P4 1.5 onto a 40gig 7200rpm HD and it's perfect.

I kinda miss not having radio sometimes cos it's plugged into an NTL anaolgue socket, and the next time i get one it'll have to have a hardware MPEG encoder (good for PVR functions to save space without compromising on quality) but apart from that it works fine, and it gets a lot of use.

anyone who's interested, let me know and I'll give you a list of the best software and other tools for capturing and editing, and how to use them properly, as i found it a steep learning curve initially, and i'm still learning.

Paulj

i got a pinnacle pctv card. Works fine but when i record with it the files produced are massive (1hr is over 2gb). Is there any way that i can capture directly to something more managable like divx or do i have to do this afterwards?

LizardKing

yeah I have a card too never really used it much , bought it cos i thought i would, interested in the software or utilities that you can use with them ...

vibe666

you'll need to capture to a lossless (or nearly lossless) format unless you have a hardware mpeg encoder chip on the capture card. if not then you're best bet would probably be the picvideo mjpeg compressor using pcm audio and then to transcode that into divx/mp3 usding virtualdub (or similar after capture). i'm just about to leave work now (in cork, coming back to dublin) so i don't have time to go into it further, but send me a PM to remind me and i'll post a full(ish) guide this evening sometime.

if you're into reading up on it though, have a look for the doom9 website or some of the following who all have the info you need.

http://www.doom9.org
http://www.tv-cards.com
http://www.vcdhelp.com
http://members.home.net/ckvideo

stevenmu

http://htpcnews.com/forums/index.php

has good info on all the hardware and software you'll need

radiospan

Killah_B wrote:

Thats the same card as I have, and I had to reinstall my system with win 2K as the card drivers kept on crashing XP.

Do you have itinstalled on XP and if so where did you get the drivers?

BTW, that card got great reviews as being far and away the best of the budget tv cards....

I'm using the drivers that came with the card. I've tried installing the 3rd-party btwincap drivers but it always crashes my PC when I'm installing them.

I use VirtualVCR to record to either HuffYUV or Picvideo M-JPEG (quality 19). Then I use AviSynth to crop, deinterlace and resize. Then VirtualDubMod to encode to XviD. I record the audio as uncompressed PCM, and then use Lame to make it MP3.

Kone

plazzTT wrote:

I was searching for a good TV card for a long time before I finally bought one.

I chose a Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe in the end. There's a slightly more expensive Expert edition too. They have them here: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/TV_Cards.html

I've no complaints about it really, I use it for recording off Sky Digital via the Svideo out at the back of my Sky box. (Check that your Sky box has Svideo out) The recording software that came with it was OK, but I'm using a freeware 3rd party tool called VirtualVCR now.

It has a remote, although I don't have much use for it. It has an FM tuner, too.

This is probably a dumb question but does this card have a connector for standard analogue tv cable (copper)??