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Gfx card with TV-in

MessiahMessiah Failed Experiment
Time to "up"-grade the puter, and as usual, I need help.

Could you guys help me get a cheap PCI-express card with TV-in that fits inside a pundit p3-ph4?

Comments

  • A used Club 3D / Powercolor / HIS X1950Pro ViVo should do the trick.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    If you want a tv tuner, you'll want an All-In-Wonder or Nvidia mediacenter-type card.
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    I would personally avoid the ATI cards. I've had bad experience with their TV in drivers and software, sometimes to the point I have to reboot my system for any application to get the video off the card.
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    You can probably get far superior results at about the same price by getting separate graphics and tuner cards.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    Seperate tuners are nice, but the selection of software is just about as bad as the combo-cards.
  • BigglesBiggles <font color=#AAFFAA>The Man Without a Face</font>
    The drivers tend to be better (mind you, it's not hard to be better than ATI's drivers...), and the software selection is the same: whatever you find on the web. Meanwhile, the hardware is often better spec'ed.
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    I've still been wandering between tuner software for ages. Only recently did I settle on Sage for my media center, but it's nothing I can use for regular windowed desktop use.

    And with ATI cards, I've found a number of hacked driver releases that offer significant stability improvements. It's kind of shocking how easy it apparently is to fix the ATI drivers, but how they apparently refuse to put forth the effort. Worse, the nVidia drivers just seem to be bloating to a point where they might beat out the ATI set.

    But Biggles is right, a dedicated video card [B]will[/B] offer better performance-per-dollar hands down, and a dedicated tuner offers some better choices. A Hauppauge PVR-series or Pinnacle Tuner card are your best choices, but there's a number of others that are nearly as good at slightly less cost.
  • Hmm, I thought he needed a S-Video/Composite In connector when the one he asked was a common antenna input... of course in this case it is always better to use separate cards. I myself have been playing with DVB cards and software for quite some time and my current tuner is an Austrian-made Digital Everywhere FireDTV C/CI (current price 178,80e or 1650kr plus shipping @ [url=http://www.digital-everywhere.com/shop/]their online shop[/url], DVB-S2 and DVB-T versions also available) which has served me well for over two years. This FireWire connected external card is still one of the few DVB-C tuners that support QAM256 modulation (required for watching 1080i/50Hz HD channels), has integrated CI for PayTV, ships with remote control, all the necessary cables (including 1.8m 4-pin/6-pin and 6-pin/6-pin FW cables) and software based on [url=http://www.dvbviewer.com/]DVBViewer Pro[/url] (still the only good DVB software for Windows, was well worth 15 euros even before Digital Everywhere upgraded their previous MyTheatre-based software to "FireDTV Viewer"). Of course if you're using Linux then you have more good options to choose from... [url=http://linuxmce.com/]Linux MCE[/url] is definitely the finest all-around media solution to date.

    In case you solely want to watch regular digital tv channels (as analog broadcasting is almost history in Nordic countries), almost any card will do (with DVBViewer Pro or MythTV, most cheap cards ship with poor software).

    As for the graphics card, [url=http://www.palit.biz/main/vgapro.php?id=105]Palit Radeon HD 2600Pro 512MB Super[/url] (costs about 60e or 560kr) would probably be the best choice because of UVD or Unified Video Decoder (GPU helps your antiquated CPU to deal with HD video) which is part of the AVIVO HD technology (which should be working fine with Linux, too).

    Edit: Hauppauge/TechnoTrend and Pinnacle make good cards, but the drivers pretty much suck...

    Edit2: FireDTV products are also available through several Swedish resellers: [url]http://www.tystpc.nu/sida.php?s=butiker[/url]
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    I'd like to add that the cards I suggested may have had crappy drivers back in the day, but not anymore. However, their included software is simply terrible. My favorite example: A now-dated version of the Hauppauge WinTV software ended up consuming all remaining space on the HDD during a recording, and instead of stopping as one would normally suspect, decided to restart the file at the first accessible sector of the drive. That system didn't boot again, and this problem actually happened twice. Go Hauppauge. And the remote hardware with the Pinnacle cards is just unbelievably terrible in all of its iterations. One is best replacing it with either an MCE remote or a three-button accelerometer combo remote.

    On the topic of remotes, also fun is the ATI Remote Wonder. Never before would I have imagined spending days attempting to install a peripheral as simple as a remote. Judging by the general sense of anger and frustration on the forums, it appears that ATI never once tested the installer. To make matters more interesting, the drivers for the product aren't actually available for download anymore from anywhere, and even most of those aren't functional with all models. It took me weeks of casual browsing to find them, and then the installer produced incorrectly named registry keys with read permissions of "none" to even the administrator and system. This level of incompetence takes genuine skill.

    Is it really hard to just make a product that isn't bloated, painful to use, or just plain bad? Apparently, yes.
  • MessiahMessiah Failed Experiment
    Thanks guys, gonna go check around what they have at the local second hand hardware store. :)
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    I'll add to Sanfam's ATI driver installer issues. My ATI tuner card, which dates from 2001, had similar driver issues. For some reason ATI decided not to test the CD before distributing it with their hardware. The autorun program worked perfectly...until you clicked anything. Then it just gave nice "file not found" errors. Turns out they changed the paths on the disk...without ever bothering to update the autorun.

    Then to add chaos to the install process, under an older version of the OS (which was in use at the time), you had to install extra tools for the OS to provide needed DLLs for the ATI driver. If you failed to install these tools [I]before[/I] installing the driver, then the driver failed. If the driver failed, it refused to work even if the tools were later installed. You could not uninstall the driver because, guess what, the driver was not properly installed. Nor could you install the driver because, guess what, the driver was not uninstalled. The result was, in order to force the driver to be reinstalled, the card had to be physically moved to a different PCI slot. Then it thought it was different hardware and would install without a problem. Oh yes, and ATI provided no documentation on any of this, including the need of te extra stuff installed from the OS disk first. Go ATI!

    Now, come along more recent operating systems, and the driver works fine (the one you download from ATI), but now their viewing software has issues. Turns out their current driver only works with the current (relatively) version of ATI Multimedia Center. Oh, and they forced you to [I]buy[/I] an upgrade initially. The old version would still...somewhat...work. Finally they released the upgrade for free. However, the upgrade has a fun bug. If the boot disk of your system is FAT32, you can only record on FAT32 disks. If the boot disk of your system is NTFS, you can only record on NTFS disks. My setup contains my boot disk as FAT32 with a nice 5 or so GBs free...which is too small to record anything of size too. Meanwhile my other drives are all NTFS with plenty of room. Congrats making some of the most obscure bugs around, ATI! I mean, how can someone write an app that can only write to a Hard Drive formatted with the file system of your boot drive, yet at the same time be able to write to all main Windows file systems without problems?

    I've never encountered so many bad drivers and software from any other manufacturer. How hard is it for ATI to simply do a little quality control on their programming team?
  • [QUOTE=Messiah;168618]Thanks guys, gonna go check around what they have at the local second hand hardware store. :)[/QUOTE]
    [url=http://www.komplett.se/]Komplett.se[/url] seems to have the lowest prices and widest range of products in Gothenburg... they don't have anything from Palit, but Powercolor and Sapphire 2600Pro cards are equally good choices though a bit pricier.

    Btw, you still haven't mentioned is it DVB-T or DVB-C card you're looking for?
  • MessiahMessiah Failed Experiment
    Don't really much care, since Im gonna be converting home videos mostly..
  • So actually all you need is a SCART->S-Video adapter cable (if there are no S-Video outputs in your VCR) and a ViVo card...

    ...or a [url=http://www.pinnaclesys.com/publicsite/as/products/consumer+products/home+video/dazzle/fusion.htm]Pinnacle Dazzle Fusion[/url] USB video editing card which is probably the easiest and cheapest solution after all.
  • i know here in the States starting Februery 2009 everything will be digital no more analog at all. I have no idea what capture cards that will work with the new standard.
  • Random ChaosRandom Chaos Actually Carefully-selected Order in disguise
    From my last hunt, almost none Psi Killer
  • SanfamSanfam I like clocks.
    Well, the broadcasts may be digital, but soon enough there will be conversion boxes that should allow for traditional tuning on the output-side. But why would you buy a TV tuner to record OTA broadcast content, anyway? :P Seems kind of silly to limit yourself to 13 channels ;) If you already get cable television, you won't be affected.
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