TV Tuner card recommendations

[Curtis]

Hey all,

I'm getting interested in recording some material digitally, and I was wondering if any of you have any recommendations for a cheapish TV Tuner card. I'm not interested in buying a whole new graphics card just to get a tuner, so I'd just like to hear about any stand-alone cards.

Thanks (as always) in advance

 

[sat985]

either a happaunge or wintv, they are both cheapo cards. you could get a ati standalone card, i think they only capture 240 vertical res tho unless you patch the drivers or somthin. don't recall offhand about cheap cards.

 

[Shar]

I'm pretty sure you can capture much more than 240 vertically with the ATI TV Wonder. I have one, but I haven't fiddled with it in a long time.

Depending on what 3D card you have, you might want an ATI TV Wonder or you may want to stay away from it. ATI's product support is absolutely atrocious. I have a Nvidia TNT2 card and it has compatibility problems with the ATI TV Wonder. ATI's solution is simple; use version 2.08 of NVidia's drivers. The current version of Nvidia's drivers? 29.42.

ATI basically develops a product, and once it's hit the shelves, abandons it and moves onto the next big thing. The software that the ATI TV Wonder uses, ATI Multimedia Center, only has official support for it in version 7.1. The current version of the software is 7.6, and ATI's website has a warning on it saying that you can't use the newer versions of the Multimedia Center with the TV Wonder.

Even if you have an ATI 3D card, you may not want a TV Wonder. It looks good on paper, but ATI's support of their products is so poor that the newer versions of TV Wonder's own software won't work. You'll get one version of the software and one set of drivers. That's it. Don't expect any error fixes or updates ever again.

 

[Shinshiro]

also, if your running WinXP i would not suggest using a ATI TV Wonder cuz ATI never released any WinXP compatible drivers (the Win2000 drivers just barely work, but still have lots of bugs) and the Multimedia center v7.1 has a bunch of bugs in WinXP too (although some of those bugs may also be caused by my Geforce4 4400)

to give you an idea, right now if i try to record something the software will save it as an .mp2 file (standard video file) and nothing (not even ATI's file player) will read it, and i cant run the record scheduler to tape stuff in the future cuz doing that will cause the scheduler to crash, also the TV Tuner display has some annoying display problems that occasionally appear, also the mute button wont work (it used to work when i first got the Multimedia Center working, now after a reinstall of the Multimedia Center it dosent work)

i just hope that with the new Catalyst driver package, ATI will start including updated drivers for the ATI TV Wonder (or WinXP compliant drivers), or at the very least add support for the TV Wonder in the next Catalyst update of ATI Multimedia Center

 

[Shinshiro]

Originally posted by sat985@June 14 2002,06:13

either a happaunge or wintv, they are both cheapo cards. you could get a ati standalone card, i think they only capture 240 vertical res tho unless you patch the drivers or somthin. don't recall offhand about cheap cards.

oh by the way, hauppauge makes the WinTV

and looking on their site, its the card of choice for WinXP users

me thinks ill be returning my ATI TV Wonder and picking a WinTV up

 

[mtxblau]

Part of the reason why ATi's support is so terrible that 3rd parties are the ones that develop their drivers, basically.

For instance:

www.rage3d.com

When I first got my Radeon 64MB DDR my computer kept crashing when I changed the resolution. I quick stop at Rage3D, and that was that.

I believe Rage3D has hacked all the drivers for all ATi products. I could be wrong though.

ATi... those silly Canadians. It's a wonder they've been around this long.

I suppose that's why their videocards are so inexpensive and provide such phenomenal performance (performance vs. cost).

 

[JDAdams]

I have a WinTV Theater, and I love it. S-video out would help, but it does everything else I could ask for, and you can use DScaler (www.dscaler.org) with it to get a progressive scan picture

 

[ajnin]

dude.. look here

http://www.vcdhelp.com/comptvcards.htm

that has a comparson of alot of tv-tuner cards

http://www.tv-cards.com/

this has alot of info to.. not updated that offten anymore..

 

[Shinshiro]

one question though, do any of the Hauppauge WinTV Tuners come with the Video/sound-IN on an external box like the later version of the ATI TV Wonder PCI model???

cuz even though ATI's TV Wonder drivers and software royally sucked, that external box was l33t in convenience