Legit Reviews

Im currently Looking for a good T.v Tuner card for my PC, most people I've talked to have told me that the ATI wonder cards are good. I just wanted to get some other opinons about other cards that yall might have.

Are you looking for JUST a tuner, or do you want to be able to record the shows also?

Recording - Hauppauge - I have the PVR150 ( low end ) and it is at least 10000X better than the ATI All in Wonder I used to have!

Just a tuner - almost any will do, just have to watch if you have sat or digital cable, some of them wont be able to change channels.

Mike

when i upgrade my HD im gonna start recording them, so ill check out the PVR150.

thanks for the help

I second the PVR150. The AIW cards should mean All In Wonder why it's considered an All In Wonder. Being on an antenna setup the AIW tuners picked up considerably less than the PVR150 can pick. In fact, the PVR150 picks up all the channels that the TV picks up - close to 70% of the channels the AIW could not pick up. However, if going digital then I have been hearing good things about the PCIe based ATi 550 card.

what about PVR software, what one is better? i will soon be looking for a PVR card for building a MediaPC. I know the AIWs have free guide software so you can set and forget but what about this PVR150 you speak of? LOL

There is also the ATI Theater 550 PRO TV card....

It's cheap and gives very good picture quality in both playback and recording!

I use a Hauppauge PVR350 and love it, but the ATI card is supposed to be even better!

Software - argh...the hauppauge does come with software, but it is timer based I believe...like the old vcr's

best software I found so far has been Windows Media Center - and I hate windows..lol

free ones

http://www.gbpvr.com/

http://www.mythtv.org/

http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html - Knoppix with Myth included

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

http://www.gallm.com/

Shoot me if any of those are not free...


pay ones

http://www.meedio.com/

http://www.snapstream.com/

http://www.sagetv.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/medi ... fault.mspx



ok - add to the list if ya can

Mike

I diud actually hear good things about the 550 ATI card, but I never had luck with ATI, and I tried REAL hard...so now I am Nvidia all the way! Too many driver issues with ATI - at least in my experience.

mysettopbox.tv (Knoppix with Myth included)

That looks very interesting......I could never get MythTV installed correctly on my pc B4.........

I use the ATI Theater 550 PRO TV card to watch and record channels. Using it now to back up VHS to DVD. The software it comes with sucks so I started using Roxio. Awsome card though.

yeah, ati's theater is nice card. You can also consider hauppauge's card. I think their 350PVR is the top of the line card.

which one would you suggest..

your PVR350 or
AIW 2006 edition ?

if you want the performance, get the PVR350, if you want a card that will do all the work and pcie ready, go for aiw 2600. PVR350 installed on the pci slot so you would need a vid card, however, it has hardware encoding/decoding on the card itself.

AIW 2600 is basically a video card with AIW capability, so if you are short on the slots, this is a good option(btw, if you have a pci express system hte new aiw 2600 pcie edition is based on the 1xxx lineup so it has avivo and other features that's helping the video playback, while the agp version is based on the ati 9600).

the PVR150 would do.....

the 350 has support for mpeg encoding and decoding (decoding only works for TV out) it also has a radio tuner

Unless your going to use TV out and Radio -> the PVR150 is all you need.

WinTV card is better IMO......It has loads of support (software / OS)

They are cheaper too (i think)