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Message: [QUOTE="mudz, post: 6140038"] Here's my 2 cents worth. I have in the past had an ATI TV card and the picture quality was 'OK'...granted that was in the days of 98SE. Since that time I have had experience with a couple of Pinnacle cards...a PCTV (which is now in my box of 'spare stuff' because of issues with XP), and more recently a PCTV Pro, which replaced the previously mentioned basic PCTV card, and which is currently working in a friend's computer. I then purchased a Hauppauge WinTV Radio card (side of box says WinTV-dbx Model 401) for my computer, and am currently using it. For a period of time these two computers resided in adjacent rooms and I was able to stand in the hallway and look back and forth at the screens. I was of the opinion that the pic quality was about the same with a slight edge to the Hauppauge. This was using Hauppauge drivers and their WinTV2000 viewing program. Since then I have done some experimenting and I now use the latest Hauppauge drivers but, for the viewing program, I use Dscaler version 4.1.8 Beta. This is a gem and gives a noticably superior picture over the WinTV2000. This can be found at [URL="http://www.dscaler.com"]www.dscaler.com[/URL] It appears, from what I have read in various forums, that people who are into Home Theatre Personal Computers (HTPC), the gold standard is the Hauppauge WinTV PVR250. As I understand it there is more third party (quality) software available for this card than any other. I did not get the PVR250 since being able to record was not as important at the time as price...the 250 is a tad expensive for what I want to do which is watch TV...plain and simple. On a related note, I recently bought a Toshiba P10 laptop which comes with XP Media Centre Edition. As such it comes with a TV tuner...in this case a USB model. It looks slick and has Toshiba embossed on it. I connected it and was *very* impressed with the picture quality and how smoothly the software worked. I thought nothing more of it until this very evening, when I learned this unit is made by Hauppauge and is actually a WinTV PVR USB2 housed in a different case. A site that might be helpful in your quest is [URL="http://www.tv-cards.com"]www.tv-cards.com[/URL] . HTH M [/QUOTE]

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