Advice on which tvcard to buy??

[Grego]

I have to buy a tvcard for my pc, and since I dont know anything about this I will rely on MURC

At this point in time I am thinking of getting a card from one of these manufacturers:
Hauppauge
or
Pinnacle Systems

I would appreciate it if anyone has any experinces or other kind of wisdom!

Grego

------------------
System:
Asus A7V rev. 1.01p bios 1004.a
AMD Thunderbird 800@800
SBLive retail with liveware 3.0
Matrox g400 MAX
LG Flatron 795FT 17" monitor
IBM 13.5 GB 7200 hdd
Pioneer 103-s dvdrom
Win98 1.st edition
directx 7.0a
128mb pc133 cas2 from Memory Card Technology

[dZeus]

Don't know about Hauppage, but Pinnacle has great driver development *cough*.

There are a lot of flows in it's current drivers, and they've been aware of most of them for at least half a year. Nothing has happened yet...

[Maggi]

I recommend Hauppauge !!!

I used in on German cable & satelite TV and was stunned how DVD Max pumped it to fullscreen on my TV ...
specially those pay-TV channels, if you know what I mean ...

Say Grego, what kind of TV are you planning to watch ?
(cable, satelite or aerial)

L8r,
Maggi

[Grego]

Hi Maggi, I plan to use it with cable. Is there any particular model of Hauppauge you can recommend?

[Himself]

As an alternative to a TV card you might consider a simple device that converts video into monitor compatible signals so you can watch TV directly without the computer being involved. They are called scan converters, scan doublers, etc. Great for watching TV on your computer monitor without having to have the computer turned on.
http://www.tvone.com/cheese.htm $100 http://www.mat-co.com/ $70

[dZeus]

I've got one of those... the proview tv-box. It's a son of a b*tch, because of too many reasons to list here, and one of the most important ones:

You can only watch tv on your monitor at 50Hz, which give me a headache! Don't know about those others though.

[Maggi]

Originally posted by Grego:
Hi Maggi, I plan to use it with cable. Is there any particular model of Hauppauge you can recommend?

I'd personally choose the Win-TV PCI as minimum, since it's the cheapest one offering stereo sound.

Here's a table about the features of each card: http://www.hauppauge.com/html/products.htm

Make your mind up what you need or want and choose either the PCI, Radio (+ Radio & s-video capture) or if you can, go for the Theater (+ dolby surround decoder)

All of the above can be used in video overlay mode and therefore it's just a matter of which player you use to port it to fullscreen TV.

Right now I have the DVB-s (Digital Video Broadcast - satelite) at home, but that one's restricted to digital satelite signals only. I never ever tried any of the USB flavors, so I cannot give any input on those.

Hope that helps a bit ...

Cheers,
Maggi

[Grego]

thanks for all the info, at the moment Im leaning towards the Theater model, its not too expensive compared to the tv pci model. I dont want to buy the usb version, since I have enough cables around my appartment, kind of reminds me of spaghetti.

the wonderful world of making decisions on which hardware to buy

btw does the card require its own irq, and if yes would it be willing to share it?

[RoGuE]

Yes, the Hauppauge does require its own IRQ. One or more of its features may well fail to function if it is sharing - that is if you machine will even function properly

As you may have guessed, I've had a few difficulties setting these up in the past

Well worth it though - excellent cards.

Chris.

[Grego]

Oh well I have irq 12 available, if only that will work...

I just checked on the Hauppauge homepage, and it said that there might be problems with via chipsets unless the mobo was pci 2.1 compliant. I have just checked the manual for my asus a7v and could not find anything about this, I assume that with a board this fresh there will be no problems, but can anyone verify this?

thx
Grego

[Indiana]

I'd also recommend getting a Hauppauge one. And if you're planning to do video-captures on Win2k, you definitely should go for the Hauppauge as it's one of the very few companies whose drivers do work flawlessly in Win2k.

I have the WinTV Radio here and it can do full-res PAL captures (768x576x32@25fps) to HuffYUV or MJPEG (using the free PicVideo MJPEGu-codec) under Win2k.

The Hauppauge are also the most compatible cards if you want to use one of the "educational" decryption Programs Maggi mentioned. And yes, the quality of these decoded signals to the TV or VCR via DVDMax is simply amazing.

The cards need 2 interrupts (VfW Video and VfW Audio), to my knowledge they can be shared with other PCI cards. At least they are here without negative effects...
As mentioned they also work well in Win2K ACPI mode.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by Grego:

I just checked on the Hauppauge homepage, and it said that there might be problems with via chipsets unless the mobo was pci 2.1 compliant. I have just checked the manual for my asus a7v and could not find anything about this, I assume that with a board this fresh there will be no problems, but can anyone verify this?


thx
Grego

I have the ABit KT7-RAID here, no problems with the WinTV, even though the IRQs are shared.
AFAIK the Asus A7V and the ABit KT7 have the same VIA chipset (KT133), so the Hauppauge should work on your board as well.

[Greebe]

Grego, your MB is PCI 2.1 compliant, no worries there. One thing I found installing the Hauppauge M#401 (WinTV DBX stereo/ FM stereo w/ remote) it may take a little guggling of cards/slots/Irq's so it won't conflict with your Max.

On my initial setup it decided to share irq's with my Max and altho worked at first glace... acted very odd and then when trying to capture it would wig out the system.

(For me) It was a card shuffle to reasign IRQ (MSI 6167 MB) and all was good

I don't know about Pinnacle drivers personally (have heard they suck), Hauppauge isn't far ahead. I called up their tech support in NY and they acted bored stiff, technically clueless and wouldn't let me go... kept jabbering on and on and on...
(somebody shoot that rabbit

I like the card none the less and it performs fine. Here in the US, my model (~<$100) is 1/3 the price of the DVB-s model Maggi has.

[dZeus]

somebody shoot that rabbit

Ok, I own a Pinnacle Studio PCTV Pro, and the drivers have the following problems:

- No stereo capturing possibilities
- No mouse hiding in full-screen (because the tv viewing app doesn't use REAL fullscreen mode)
- NO OSD support in fullscreen (or in general)
- remote software only works well with tv apps, while in potential you should be able to control any app with it
- no possibility to switch sound channels on bilingual channels (for German dubbed movies
- No tuning with MHz but instead of channel frequency with manual slider
- No teletext integrated into tv viewing app
- No possibility to save settings for brightness, contrast, saturation, audiolevel and audiomode for each tv channel seperately
- No de-interlace filter that de-interlaces the video _without_ only playing back half of the lines or fields (so called line-doubling)
- Capturing software included is VERY limited in it's functionality

bugs:
- hibernation bug (trying to use PCTV after use of hibernation and bootup again results into system crash)
- when adding a channel, the channel that was selected previously to the one beng added will behave very odd, untill the frequency properties are displayed (then tunes back to the right frequency).
- sometimes the tuner does not properly tune into a channel, resulting into a lot of noise (snow)
- sometimes crashes on startup? or is that because PSU is not strong enough?
- Random crashes with 4.02 driver. 4.01 driver has been the most stable until now

[Grego]

Ok the decision now stands firm Hauppauge it is, now all that is left is to decide whether I want the stereo version og the theater version.

Thanks alot for all the input, once again murc shows its worth