External TV Tuners/PVR Devices Tested 136
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."
this is a narrow target market (Score:2, Insightful)
The author mensions the word 'quality' quite a few times... some hardware encoded screenies would have been a good way to measure those statements.
TV tuners (Score:5, Insightful)
DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER! (Score:5, Insightful)
There was also no mention whatsoever of hardware MPEG2 encoding.
If it doesn't encode MPEG2 in hardware, it's not worth buying. Period.
Cheap? (Score:3, Insightful)
How cheap is it really going to be by the time you've added everything up.
A dual tuner DirecTV tivo with 80 hours space is $100 and $5 a month covers up to 8 of them on an account.
I doubt you can get a pc with sufficient horsepower, storage, and a couple of these capture dongles for that.
Re:Cheap? (Score:4, Insightful)
They are comparing a STB box tivo for analog cable with one of these... besides, what self respecting geek doesn't have a spare hand me down PC laying around... to throw a tuner/capture card in?
FWIW the best benefit to building a PC based PVR isn't cost/subscription savings... it's CONTROL over the content. No one is going to be expiring six feet under DVR recordings [boingboing.net] without my consent on my PC DVR.
*shrug*