what are the best TV Tuner cards?

all I want is to watch TV from my PC and record whatever I want.

Which is the best TV Tuner card to do that with? And how do I compress the file with codecs?? what is the software that makes a big file decrease in size though losing a little bit of quality

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Comments

eurotrash

I use this one here, works well but you need an aerial to get all the channels, at least where I live.

bighornsheep

http://www.us.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=13864&vpn=THEATRIX&manufacture=SAPPHIRE

ATI TV Wonder Theatrix.

It's got 16MB memory for the tv tuner. Great hardware compression. The software is "buggy" with XP Pro media centre edition, but works fine with XP Home/Pro.

Enjoy~

borumas

Here's the one I have, a Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-150, it works very well for me:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815116625

Watch, Pause, Record TV on your PC, in a window or full screen!
Digital VCR, too! Record your TV shows and home movies to disk using hardware MPEG-2 compression!
High quality MPEG-2 hardware encoder used when recording, so your PC continues to run at full speed while recording videos to disk

blargoe

I've heard good things about any of the Hauppage cards and they are both windows and linux compatible (except for possibly the "win" models)

thunderleg

The Hauppauge cards themselves are pretty good.

I've got a PVR-350 which has an FM tuner that I never use...

However the included TV software has been pretty miserable in the past. They call it WinTV, and hopefully they've dropped it in favor of just about anything else.

borumas

blargoe wrote:

I've heard good things about any of the Hauppage cards and they are both windows and linux compatible (except for possibly the "win" models)

Actually I bought that model as it was supposed to be compatable for future use with Linux and MythTV, I never got around to creating an HTPC though to use it in.

TheFORCE

borumas wrote:

Here's the one I have, a Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-150, it works very well for me:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815116625

Watch, Pause, Record TV on your PC, in a window or full screen!
Digital VCR, too! Record your TV shows and home movies to disk using hardware MPEG-2 compression!
High quality MPEG-2 hardware encoder used when recording, so your PC continues to run at full speed while recording videos to disk

thats the one that i have too. you can also download free third party software that work with the Hauppauge WINTV-PVR-150. Scheduler, for example as long as the PVR-150 is connected on my box, i can set a recording to start any time i wish even if the tv is turned off. thats how i record prisonbreak heheh. i missed it yesterday.

As for compression, you can use divx or xvid using VirtualDub, another free software.

blargoe

I've been drooling over a mythtv pvr for about a year now. It's hard selling my wife on the idea but I think she'd be into it once she got used to the interface. Then there's also the cost and the time involved building it (this is the real issue these days)

borumas

blargoe wrote:

I've been drooling over a mythtv pvr for about a year now. It's hard selling my wife on the idea but I think she'd be into it once she got used to the interface. Then there's also the cost and the time involved building it (this is the real issue these days)

Yeah, I haven't had the time or $ to get one together and won't likely for the near future either lol but I would love to get one setup eventually.

JDMurray

borumas wrote:

Actually I bought that model as it was supposed to be compatable for future use with Linux and MythTV, I never got around to creating an HTPC though to use it in.

Same here. I have a small HTPC project sitting on top of my HDTV that I never finished. It has a PVR-350, 300GB hard drive, wireless network, and dual-boots Windows Media Center and KnoppMyth. I got discouraged with it when I discovered how crappy and unusable the Windows GUI looks on my HDTV when using a VGA->TV converter box. I have MAME, Orb, and a PodCast aggregater installed on it. I never did figure out how to connect it up to the Dish Network programming guide. It would be really a really cool if I could find the motivation to get it all working.