TV Tuner?

Will be building myself a PVR sometime soon... And need a TV tuner card for it. Any suggestions? Also, is there anyway to network it so that I can share the video feed from it to the rest of the network?

The TV tuner cards I see reccomended the most are hauppauge, leadtek winTV, ATi TV wonder and the ATi all in wonder series. I myself only have one card from that list so I can only speak about it (AIW 8500dv). It is certainly among the best for picture/capture quality though.

First point I want to make is make sure that your TV capture device is a card, do not get a USB device (such as ATi TV Wonder USB) as USB does not have the bandwidth neccessary to capture at high res/high bit rate.

If you dont have a video card for the machine yet I would reccomend an ATi AIW 7500 (if this system will be used for gaming you might want an AIW 8500) you should be able to find one for pretty cheap.

As for sharing the video feed to other comps on the network I am not aware of a way to do that and have wondered that myself. You could try using VNC (virtual network connection) or something similar but I dont think it will work very well, it would be more like watching a slide show then a movie. You can always capture TV/Movies to the hard drive of the PVR machine and share the folder they are in with the other comps so that you can watch them later from other machines.

Well, bandwidth shouldnt be much of a problem--I will be putting a gigabit network in soon. It would be very, very cool to be able to share feed across the network...

If you ask me, the more dollars you spend here, the better (and that doesn't include the AIW). ATI TV Wonder is a good enough card for me, but don't expect perfect quality. It's nothing like DVD and it doesn't look as good as it does on a TV. Now I've never made a VCD or DVD and tried to watch it on TV, so I don't know how good it looks on a TV, but from what I see on my monitor, it's low quality. Don't get the wrong idea, though. It's still a good card, works perfectly for what I want and at a distance, it looks perfectly fine. Also, like the above poster said, avoid USB like the plague. Lastly, make sure you have a large hard drive (large ) and that it's fast. Make sure you're running as few apps as possible while recording video, and I suggest strongly, do not compress on the fly. It looks crappy, even with a fast drive and lots of RAM. What is this for? Archiving video (like the Simpsons which is what I do) or just for catching TV you miss? If you just want to see TV you missed, get a cheaper one, as it won't bug you too much.

My 2 cents, USD

Z

Figure out what capture options the cards have. I know the pinnacle cards are good and cheap because they can capture raw uncompressed avi. This is the largest but good because compressing realtime can be a problem with most cpus if its not hardware compressing it.

Again i will say i thought the happauge tuners all sucked. I dont have experience with them thats just the impression i get from other ppl.

You might want to get a card that can hardware encode. Most are pretty expensive. I know the creative card can do this for under $100. One problem with it though is that the capture format is proprietary. Last time i checked you cant do much manipulating with the file after it is captured. This is this way to prevent pirating.

If you have a fast hard drive and need a cheap card I would go for a pinnacle one. CompUSA sometimes has the PCTV Pro for $30 for a special deal. This comes with a remote, has stereo sound, has svideo in, and has fm radio.

I've got 3; the Hauppauge Win TV, the Leadtek WinFast and the ATI 8500 DVI all in wonder. Here's my view after fooling around with all 3 for a few months.... The ATI is just the worst and being the most expensive, the biggest disappointment. As a TV card I agree with DaddyB the capture function is great, but other than that, I'd have to say don't waste your money. The picture quality is just horrible. There are 2 aspect ratio settings but you can't really get it to transform the TV signal to a HDTV type aspect ratio. As a game card it's weak as well. Out of the box the drivers won't support newer games like UT2003. Of course you can download the latest drivers but have fun installing them it's about a 2 hour process...if your lucky. I've gone down that road 3 times unfortunately trying to get this card working on different platforms. The remote did work great though.

The Hauppauge WINTV card is OK as a tuner but it doesn't come with any timeshifting software or support stereo audio. It does provide an excellent picture. The real bonus is that a shareware program called dscaler works with this card and using dscaler as the interface you get almost unlimited aspect ratio combinations along with deinterlacing and stereo audio. Dscaler is a great program you should check it out.

In my view the WinFast TV2000XP is the winner out of the box. The picture looks great. It has a nice interface that sets itself up in the taskbar. It does a letterbox aspect ratio and they throw in a FM radio for grins and has a great software package and a remote. I haven't had a chance to check out the time shifting functionality yet, but I think this card is the best bang for your buck.

BTX

I am ordering this card soon. I really like this manufacture and the remote is pretty cool. Also it does MPEG-2 and coaxial input which is cool.