Need suggestion for TV tuner card...

UncleDynamite · 2004-05-16, 10:19 AM

I'm planning on purchasing a TV tuner card for my PC in the next month, and I'm wondering what recommendations people have. The obvious choice was ATi's TV Wonder Pro (or VE) card, but I heard some bad reviews regarding it. So now I'm pretty open to any possibilty. I would rather not spend too much money (more than $100), but I'm willing to spend more if a particular card is really good.

Specs (in case you need them):
Intel P4 2.8, 800MHZ FSB
ATi 9800 Pro
1GB of Memory

Thanks guys

Acaila · 2004-05-16, 10:51 AM

My backup PC which acts as my media centre has a tv wonder pro in it. I have had no problems with it, works well. Good capture quality, accurate, stable. I have read bad reviews about it aswell, but I have had no problems with it.

MSI TV@nywhere is a decent tuner card.

HDTV Wonder from ATi is pretty fucking alright. Your PC is more than capable of playback, depending upon your HDD, you may have problems recording HD. I am looking at buying 1 of these atm. It is tuner for HDTV as well as standard, pretty sweet.

Rbstr · 2004-05-16, 12:32 PM

I have an Avermedia TV Studio, it was only 50 bucks and came with a remote. But it doesn't seem to like to record, and the IQ realy isn't that high. But it may be a haven't updated the drivers for it forever

Daleon · 2004-05-17, 10:16 AM

Best suggestion for a tuner card, find one that has hardware mpeg-4 encoding and this is the important part, records the AUDIO also. Most, almost ALL, tuner cards out there record the audio via a line input of your sound card. This = A$$. You can get some nasty audio/video synch issues. Depends a little on your system, stuff you do while recording, and the software for the board.

Personally I don't like Pinnacle at all. Haugepauge is ok, little over priced. A friend of mine got an old adaptec tuner card that is one of the best I've ever seen for cheap on ebay. ATi.... decent as long as you got a rather good sound card and system resources.

UncleDynamite · 2004-05-18, 08:59 PM

Thanks everyone for your suggestions so far. I haven't made a decision yet, but I'll keep your comment in mind. Daleon especially, since I didn't know about the audio part. Thanks a lot.