External TV Tuners/PVR Devices Tested

Solomon writes "TV Tuners for the PC have existed for a long time but with the ever increasing popularity of TiVo-like services and the possibility of replicating such features on your Windows PC with little effort and a small investment, tuners have been getting a lot of attention this year. Today there's three-way shootout posted at TechSpot with products from Digistor, Transcend and a very appealing offer from RTV called the VEG that lets you play consoles in your monitor. Although neither of these devices can match TiVo completely, they do give you a very cheap alternative."

wow

[confusion]

With all the spam in here its starting to remind me of my inbox.

Anyway, I have a 9600 all-in-wonder, and I really really like the cable tv tuner deal. I desperately need to upgrade, but I am having a hard time parting with the built in tuner. I suppose these would be a good alternative.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/ [syslog.org]

Be careful

[exhilaration]

...of any external tuner that claims to let you play console games. *Every* external tuner I've seen has had too much lag to let you play console games.

Doesn't include the best product

[beetle496]

They failed to review the best product available, EyeTV [elgato.com]

Re:Be careful

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you even need a tuner for consoles? Get something with composite or s-video input for a lower price and better quality.

Re:I thought it was unwise -

[topham]

USB 2.0 has sufficient bandwidth if the device performs onboard encoding. (MPEG2 for instance).

Re:I thought it was unwise -

[Schmucky The Cat]

A USB full speed (1.1) interface is good enough if the USB device has it's own electronics to compress the signal or if it is just forwarding an already compressed signal.

A USB high speed (2.0) interface is good enough by itself.

Notes from A MythTV User

[drewzhrodague]

DO your research FIRST, and just buy a PVR-250 or PVR-350. Friend of mine didn't listen to me, and went and bought himself a cheap $29 tuner card for $180 -- and no MPEG.

I have an old non-mpeg tuner card, and it works great with MythTV. Dedicate a box to the task. Get a nice TV-Out card that you can live with. Get the remote control, or a longer-range wireless keyboard.

MythTV blows my mind everytime I use it: KnoppMyth [mysettopbox.tv]

Do it cheaper/better with Linux?

[EvilGrin666]

Its a shame they didn't compare these products against MythTV [mythtv.org]. I've been using it quite happily for some time on my Linux box equipped with a Hauppage TV card. I suspect it works out cheaper than the options offered in the article and has comparable features [mythtv.org] to a tivo...

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[wizbit]

Chipset is similar, I believe. The 250s (and the "Media Center Edition" 250s) add additional inputs - I believe the 150 only has S-Video and a tuner - and a remote on the non-MCE model. The 350 adds its own tv-out (though it's a bit of a pain to get working properly) and can do nice things like re-interlace the tv signal so your set gets the extra niceties like closed-captioning, and better picture quality from what I've heard. The 350 is up around $150-170 if memory serves.

They're not great gamer cards, btw, so you might be better off looking at an nvidia chipset if you want to play games on your homebrew pvr.

yuck

[enrico_suave]

could they pick some of the crappiest cheeziest bunch of external tuners to test?

What about hauppauge wintv usb 2 or plextor convertX PVR [byopvr.com] (which has both PC and Mac pvr software)

For internal devices I like the wintv pvr250. Yes the pvr150 is cheaper and comes with a better remote/ir blaster, but the pvr250 is better supported in linux with the ivtv drivers being pretty mature/stable for that card.

*shrug*

rampy

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[JWW]

You know, you can modify the bitrate and capture resolution for the 250's, its not a constant setting. You can configure it from inside myth.

I've used avidemux2 to edit out commercials and have burned that content to DVD just fine.

PVR-150 does not work with MythTV.

[yet another coward]

The PVR-150 does not work with the ivtv driver or Myth. It is close to working. According to the mailing list, the audio does not work yet. One developer reported a solution. He has not rolled his code back into the main driver yet.

I hope the PVR-500 becomes supported by ivtv. It has two tuners on a single card, a great gain for people building compact MythTV systems.

Be very careful when purchasing hardware for MythTV. It is a fantastic package, but only with the right hardware.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[timeOday]

The PVR 350 is not worth it to me until Hauppauge gets off its butt and makes the video decompression work under linux.

I go the $29 route myself. In fact my computer is recording a show at this moment. I don't see the point of paying $150 for a hardware compressor when a CPU powerful enough to do the job costs half of that. Plus I can use any new gee-whiz codec that comes along.

Re:DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

[steve_bryan]

"... us lucky people in Europe can receive MPEG2 streams over the air using DVB tuner cards, no encoding necessary"

The lucky people in the USA can get our MPEG2 streams free with an antenna and OTA HD tuner. But awareness of this capability is still quite limited. It seems as though the cable and satellite companies have succeeded in convincing most people that HD is only available by paying a monthly fee.

Re:OS X support?

[yet another coward]

Here [elgato.com] is the best chance. If any company makes such a product, El Gato [elgato.com] is the one.

Re:Notes from A MythTV User

[Al Al Cool J]

Unfortunately it's not a simple matter of bitrate or resolution. My understanding is that the 250 uses noncompliant PTS information in the mpeg2 stream, and that this can cause sync errors. Not everybody experiences it, and it seems to be more of a problem with encoding from VHS rather than from the tuner. I've found the problem using the tuner as well as s-video from a cable box as the source, and when I use replex on the stream, it complains about masses of PTS errors.

I haven't tried avidemux2 (I don't have time for editing or transcoding) but I'm guessing whatever it does to the file corrects the glitches.