help me with tuner cards

I purchased a tuner card with the ati theater 550pro chip a couple of months ago and although the picture looked like crap on my LCD monitor it was fine to watch if I was couple of feet away from the monitor.

Now I got a HDTV and the analog signal looks very bad while digital looks great, but HD channel are artifacting, I planned on making an HTPC for it but I decided against it because if I can't get something that gets digital channels it wouldn't be worth it. This is where I need help, is there a tuner that is out now or will be soon that can tune digital and HD channels? If I get a couple box (which I currently don't have), will it allow me to get all the channels in digital instead of analog? My cable is advertived as digital so I btw(cablevision/Optimum).

Thanks for the help.

i don't know much about the theater 550pro, but I do have the hdtvwonder. i know that ati specifically says that the hdtvwonder cannot decode QAM (digital cable) streams, and I tested it in windows to make sure. However, in linux, I can view QAM because a different firmware gets uploaded to the card. I just tried looking around the ati site but didn't see anything specific for your card.

I bought my dad a Dvico FusionHDTV card for christmas, and it would decode a few channels, but not that many, and the ones it did decode were choppy. I think it was because of the processor in the computer that was being used (an amd athlon 2000+), so I think with a stronger processor the card might work better.

The problem with QAM is that some channels are encrypted, so even if the card can view QAM, it most likely cannot decode the encrypted channels.

As for ATSC signal, my dad discovered something accidentally. He hooked up an old amplified UHF antenna to his tv that has a hdtv tuner built into it, and he was able to grab HD channels with it. The thing surprising thing to me is that therer are special "HDTV" antennas being sold, but any antenna that can grab UHF signals is all that is needed (as well as a hdtv/digital tuner to decode the signal).

splat said:

I bought my dad a Dvico FusionHDTV card for christmas, and it would decode a few channels, but not that many, and the ones it did decode were choppy. I think it was because of the processor in the computer that was being used (an amd athlon 2000+), so I think with a stronger processor the card might work better.

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It is actually the tuner on my tv that is having choppiness, I though it could be defective but it only happens to channels in a certain range of channels.

you might not be getting a clean signal on the cable. I know that tuners for the computer are more sensitive to the signal strength, so I'd suggest buying a cheap signal booster or amplifier to see if that helps.