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Gfx card with TV-in
Messiah
Failed Experiment
in Zocalo v2.0
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?
Could you guys help me get a cheap PCI-express card with TV-in that fits inside a pundit p3-ph4?
Comments
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.
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]
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.
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?
[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?
...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.