Tuner card opinions - Vista

[Guest]

I don't believe that ATI intends to support my AIW card so I'm looking for a
TV tuner/capture card. Nvidia has a dual tuner card as well as Hauppage.
Both seem to be supported in Vista.
Any comments about either of these cards (or others) and the quality of the
Vista support?
Do they come with reasonable software for viewing/capturing, or is Media
Center the only option?
Is it a reasonable assumption that any capture card supported in Vista right
now uses hardware encoding?
Any information or opinion is appreciated.

Bill

 

[Keith]

Hi Bill,

I have the Hauppauge HVR-1600 running under X64 Ultimate. I was not able to
get the included software work with my Satellite hookup, so I downloaded and
used GB-PVR (free). I can now use my card to record shows ;->

 

[Guest]

Bill,

I have a Hauppauge HVR-1600 and an ATI HDTV Wonder working perfectly under
Vista Enterprise. I never tried to get the proprietary EPG for either
product to work in Vista because they were a nightmare under XP. I am using
Beyond TV 4 with Vista and it works great.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the responses. I bought an Hauppage PVR-150. The included
software works perfectly. However Media Center shows live TV at about 1
frame per second (part of the time) even though it will record at the correct
speed video wise. Unfortunately it can't find the sound input at all. I
have a few other video editing programs that cannot find the audio input
either. Fortunately it works with the included software.
It's interesting that you mention Beyond TV. I installed it to see what it
was and it screwed things up so badly that I had to revert to a previous
image of my C drive to fix it.
There are certain features that I miss from the ATI software. In particular
I miss the ability to have the TV playing in the corner as a background image
where you could adjust the opacity. Ah well...