TV Tuner

[Mark]

I am looking for a decent TV tuner card so that i can use my computer as a
VCR but burn to DVD.

Hopefully for less than £50, but the ones i find seem great up until the
point where they mention their capture quality, which appears to be pretty
crap.

FM tuner, remote control etc - not essential but would prefer!

Cheers for any advice

Thommo

 

[John]

I am looking for a decent TV tuner card so that i can use my computer as a
VCR but burn to DVD.

Hopefully for less than £50, but the ones i find seem great up until the
point where they mention their capture quality, which appears to be pretty
crap.

FM tuner, remote control etc - not essential but would prefer!

Cheers for any advice

Thommo

How high are you talking about? Actually it captures it I think higher
than 480x480 svcd quality and a bit higher I think. Cant remember
exactly. It really depends on the software you are using and the
processing power and overall speed of your system. In the past there
were a few chips that were used Conenxant made most of them I think .
They have a new generation of them now but Ive read some sites where
some guys seem to do some fairly detailed tests (dont have the links
) and they claim there wasnt a huge difference in quality. So Im
going by my older BTxxxxx generation chip board.

The main thing for me was idiosyncratic software. My favorite easy to
use software Power VCR worked great for me and I really like the
overall way it worked but it seemed to avoid 480x480 format and had
other formats ranging from low to reasonably high Mpeg2 but had
problems with TMPGenc so it was hard to burn them to svcds.

Thats my main problem. Another thing as Ive posted - everyone tells
you to capture at really low res for TV cause it = VHS quality. When
you do that it comes out like KA KA. You have to up the bitrate and
even the overall format - then it comes out much better.

The problem though is hassle free capture directly to mpeg2 480x480
for easy burning to SVCDs . I just cant seem to do that. I always have
to convert it and even have problems with that. Now the strange this
theres a hack so power vcd can save in 480x480 but then it looks
crappy. Its all a bit of a mystery. If you save to a HIGHER format
that permits a HIGHER bitrate then it comes out fine. Why is that? I
dont know since TV is supposed to = 352x240 and a low bitrate.

Im going to do another round of capturing tests - havent done them for
a few months after I resintalled everything so maybe newer software
will have solved these problems - new version of PowerVCR or WINDVD
etc.

People said WINDVD the various versions were better and they have a
svcd capture setting but still found problems. Is it the hardware?
Well it captures the stuff fine at an even higher format as I said.
And I found one piece of software that was markedly better at captures
on the same card. It was called something weird like WINDVR something
like that. It was really crude , seemed like some guy makng shareware
at his home. The interface looked way cruder vs the other more pro
looking stuff - I really didnt like it overall except for the captures
which worked perfectly.

 

[John]

People said WINDVD the various versions were better and they have a
svcd capture setting but still found problems. Is it the hardware?
Well it captures the stuff fine at an even higher format as I said.
And I found one piece of software that was markedly better at captures
on the same card. It was called something weird like WINDVR something
like that. It was really crude , seemed like some guy makng shareware
at his home. The interface looked way cruder vs the other more pro
looking stuff - I really didnt like it overall except for the captures
which worked perfectly.

Correction it wasnt WINDVR which is a pro looking prog - they make
several I think WINDVR and WINDVD creator etc. I tried them all and
they didnt work right for me.

Cant remember the name.

 

[Big Mac]

I am looking for a decent TV tuner card so that i can use my computer as a
VCR but burn to DVD.

Hopefully for less than £50, but the ones i find seem great up until the
point where they mention their capture quality, which appears to be pretty
crap.
FM tuner, remote control etc - not essential but would prefer!
Cheers for any advice >Thommo

What does L50 translate to in USA bucks? $100 ? or?

I recently got a Hauppauge" TV card. It was their older technology
card. More or less dumping them for $20 American after a rebate. It
was high tech back in the late 90s I believe.

The card works great. The only drawback for me, because it is older
technology, is that it can only capture in mono. & it can capture in
MPG, & looks pretty good. However, I am not sure about how a captured
video looks good in full-screen mode. It looks good in WMP at 200%..
It makes something like a 2 MBs per one minute MPG. You can also
choose to record in .AVI format. This format uses HUGE amounts of
hard drive memory compared to .MPG. Perhaps AVI would be better for
full-screen, but I don't know. It seems flawed to use up so much disk
space, but maybe that's what it takes for no loss in the pic.

All I am saying is that I heard the Hauppauge had good stuff. Look
for something more up-to-date from them. Here is what I believe to be
their top of the line TV card/recorder ($199):

http://registration.hauppauge.com/webstore/hardware.asp#pvr350

 

[Mark]

Cheers Guys,

I've just gone and purchased a LeadTek card from Ebuyer!!

take a look:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40627

there are 63 (mostly) good reviews on it. And they do say the capture
quality is good. It has FM tuner and Remote, and it cost £32, plus about £8
postage for Monday delivery.

(£40 GB = $72 US)

Let me know what you think of the specs, price, etc, as i dont have a clue!!

Thommo

 

[Big Mac]

Correction it wasnt WINDVR which is a pro looking prog - they make
several I think WINDVR and WINDVD creator etc. I tried them all and
they didnt work right for me.
Cant remember the name.

In looking at my old technology Hauppauge TV tuner card I mentioned in
this thread, it is called WinTV. It has two programs to use with it.
Both use the same configuration settings windows it looks like.
WinTV2000 & WinTV32. WinTV2000 is easier to use & looks better. But
there is probably something better to use by them here in 2004.

Big Mac

 

[Adam H]

I am looking for a decent TV tuner card so that i can use my computer as a

VCR but burn to DVD.

Hopefully for less than £50, but the ones i find seem great up until the
point where they mention their capture quality, which appears to be pretty
crap.

FM tuner, remote control etc - not essential but would prefer!

Cheers for any advice

Thommo

I wouldn't recommend using the tuner on a capture card, unless you have a
very skanky analog source anyway. If you have digital TV, use the S-Video
out to S-Video In on the card for much better quality.

I use a Hauppauge WinTV FM. You can pick them up for around £30-40 now, and
they are very good. You can use the brilliant free program VirtualDub to
capture with, and TMPGenc for encoding to MPEG2. You need a big HD for the
raw AVIs before converting.

If you are not that bothered about quality, forking out a bit more on a card
with hardware MPEG2 encoding might be an idea, but you will be on the wrong
side of $100 for even a half-decent one. Like I said, the quality won't be
as good, but they're easy to deal with, as they produce a DVD compatible
MPEG2 file without any extra encoding.

 

[Big Mac]

Cheers Guys,

I've just gone and purchased a LeadTek card from Ebuyer!!

take a look:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40627

there are 63 (mostly) good reviews on it. And they do say the capture
quality is good. It has FM tuner and Remote, and it cost £32, plus about £8
postage for Monday delivery.

(£40 GB = $72 US)

Let me know what you think of the specs, price, etc, as i dont have a clue!!

Thommo

You are probably going to be quite happy with it. I just do not know
about the more modern cards & how they capture for full-screen
playback. I do see my brand (but not this old model) listed there at
that site too. It is listed at L43 for the Hauppauge.

 

[Adam H]

Cheers Guys,

I've just gone and purchased a LeadTek card from Ebuyer!!

take a look:
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X2
92ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40627

there are 63 (mostly) good reviews on it. And they do say the capture
quality is good. It has FM tuner and Remote, and it cost £32, plus about £8
postage for Monday delivery.

(£40 GB = $72 US)

Let me know what you think of the specs, price, etc, as i dont have a clue!!

Thommo

This is the one I use. It won't let you down. I am sure you can find it
cheaper elsewhere, though.
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=517802621&action=c2hvd
19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=46751

A word of warning, though, if you are an XP user, many capture cards have
serious compatibility problems. I use Win2K myself, and I have had nothing
but pure joy from this card.

 

[kony]

I wouldn't recommend using the tuner on a capture card, unless you have a
very skanky analog source anyway. If you have digital TV, use the S-Video
out to S-Video In on the card for much better quality.

I use a Hauppauge WinTV FM. You can pick them up for around £30-40 now, and
they are very good. You can use the brilliant free program VirtualDub to
capture with, and TMPGenc for encoding to MPEG2. You need a big HD for the
raw AVIs before converting.

If you are not that bothered about quality, forking out a bit more on a card
with hardware MPEG2 encoding might be an idea, but you will be on the wrong
side of $100 for even a half-decent one. Like I said, the quality won't be
as good, but they're easy to deal with, as they produce a DVD compatible
MPEG2 file without any extra encoding.

IMHO, except for rare events it's better to capture to a compressed
format. I have/had multiple cards and have captured raw, Huffyuv, MJPEG,
MPEG2, Divx, etc, and find that if it isn't captured to final format in
realitme then I put off recompressing it and it just piles up, Gigs of
video waiting to be recompressed. These days with modern system
performance you can capture directly to divx and the resulting filesize,
bitrate is so low it can even be saved directly to a hard drive in another
system across a 100Mb LAN. There's just that issue of support for it, I
have PCs set up for multimedia playback on TVs but look forward to set-top
Divx players in the future... will be really nice to be able to have
several hours of video per each DVD.

 

[kony]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:09:47 -1000, "(e-mail address removed)"

Thats my main problem. Another thing as Ive posted - everyone tells
you to capture at really low res for TV cause it = VHS quality. When
you do that it comes out like KA KA. You have to up the bitrate and
even the overall format - then it comes out much better.

Whoever told you that, to capture at low-res, was just plain wrong. I'd
consider 480x480 to be an absolute minimum. i just keep hoping the Divx
boxtop players will become more popular, affordable, mature.

Then again, bitrate can have a lot to do with how dirty the signal is... I
hate to say it but after our neighbor's kid ran over the cable distro box
across the street (and it was repaired) suddenly picture quality was
better, could use a lower bitrate for same quality TV caps, though I'd
already reduced use of splitters as much as possible, redid a cable run
and a couple connectors by that point in time.

 

[Adam H]

Whoever told you that, to capture at low-res, was just plain wrong. I'd

consider 480x480 to be an absolute minimum. i just keep hoping the Divx
boxtop players will become more popular, affordable, mature.

Most broadcast sources, particularly analog, don't actually take advantage
of the full D1 resolution(720x480), so even 480x480 can often be a waste.
Even a lot of digital channels broadcast as low as 360x480, so 720x480 is a
spectacular waste of resolution and bitrate.

 

[Adam H]

If you are not that bothered about quality, forking out a bit more on a
card

IMHO, except for rare events it's better to capture to a compressed
format. I have/had multiple cards and have captured raw, Huffyuv, MJPEG,
MPEG2, Divx, etc, and find that if it isn't captured to final format in
realitme then I put off recompressing it and it just piles up, Gigs of
video waiting to be recompressed.

That's why I suggested hardware encoding for lazy encoders. However, if you
want quality, you have to either spend in excess of $1000 on a quality MPEG2
hardware encoder, or do it the "hard way" in software, which also gives you
much better options of noise reduction, color correction, editing and any
kind of processing you might want to add.

These days with modern system
performance you can capture directly to divx and the resulting filesize,
bitrate is so low it can even be saved directly to a hard drive in another
system across a 100Mb LAN. There's just that issue of support for it, I
have PCs set up for multimedia playback on TVs but look forward to set-top
Divx players in the future... will be really nice to be able to have
several hours of video per each DVD.

At 352x480, which is perfectly adequate for most material recorded from TV,
you can easily fit 3 hours on a single DVD at very good quality, and with
the new dual layer disks, you get 6 hours+.

 

[Alien Zord]

I am looking for a decent TV tuner card so that i can use my computer as a
VCR but burn to DVD.

Hopefully for less than £50, but the ones i find seem great up until the
point where they mention their capture quality, which appears to be pretty
crap.

In UK forget about analogue TV cards, get a digital terrestrial (Freeview)
card as DTT is transmitted already compressed in mpeg2 so recording is
always as good as the original and there are lots of other advantages too.
Read here:
http://www.nebula-electronics.com/information/info.asp?Code=0001

They are twice what you want to spend but the results are well worth it.

 

[Adam H]

In UK forget about analogue TV cards, get a digital terrestrial (Freeview)

card as DTT is transmitted already compressed in mpeg2 so recording is
always as good as the original and there are lots of other advantages too.
Read here:
http://www.nebula-electronics.com/information/info.asp?Code=0001

They are twice what you want to spend but the results are well worth it.

They are indeed very handy, but the obvious problem is that you are limited
to the channels that are available on Freeview, which is really quite
limited.

 

[Alien Zord]

They are indeed very handy, but the obvious problem is that you are limited
to the channels that are available on Freeview, which is really quite
limited.

Sorry? UK analogue TV has 5 channels, Freeview some 60 channels.
http://www.dtg.org.uk/retailer/dtt_channels.htm

 

[John]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004 03:09:47 -1000, "(e-mail address removed)"



Whoever told you that, to capture at low-res, was just plain wrong. I'd
consider 480x480 to be an absolute minimum. i just keep hoping the Divx
boxtop players will become more popular, affordable, mature.

Yeah thats all over the net. The standard advice you find. However
other websites have said it was wrong and that matches with my
experience.

However my big beef is WHAT software captures directly to 480x480
, looks good and is totally mpeg2 SVCD comapatible to the point I dont
have to do anything to it except maybe edit it for commercials?

Ive had two annoying problems.

1) Why is it that you can rip movies at 480x480 and they look great.
But when I capture even at 480x480 I can get some artifacts etc?
If I capture in higher format it looks fine but its not svcd
compatible and I have problems in tmpgenc trying to convert it.
The fact I can capture at a higher rate and it comes out fine seems to
suggest its not the card. Or maybe it is.

But then heres the weird part. That prog I mentioned which I forget
the name of. For some bizarre reason it not only captures 480x480 and
even LOWER res which looks way better than all the other progs Ive
tried on the same card , the captures are totally compatible. I can
burn straight to svcd without problems.

It solves both problems. I can capture as I said fine looking captures
but only at fairly high res (higher than 480x480) in all the well
known progs - as I mentioned some dont even have the option of a
480x480 save. But even when they do like WINDVR they dont look good
and they arent compatible for some strange reason.

But this one cheapo prog fixes everything . Strange. Why am I not
using that then? It was shareware and the trial was up and I lost it.
Cant remember the name of it and it was really crappy. The interface
was really crude. No way would I use it for scheduling and watching TV
, too crude feeling.

Who knows my system was a bit wonky then so maybe Ill start it up with
the same progs and everything will work fine but Im not counting on
it.

 

[Adam H]

Sorry? UK analogue TV has 5 channels, Freeview some 60 channels.

http://www.dtg.org.uk/retailer/dtt_channels.htm

I just assumed he had access to some kind of cable or satellite service, as
there was nothing in his post to suggest otherwise.

 

[kony]

Yeah thats all over the net. The standard advice you find. However
other websites have said it was wrong and that matches with my
experience.

There seems to be two camps. one that points out the resolution of the TV
signal, and the other that has tried both and notices that capturing at
that resolution does not retain as much detail. Today the situation is
further complicated by video cards that (re)process the signal and smooth
over it all... for a while if I really wanted to critically view a video,
i'd use amoung all things, an old nVidia Riva128 because it left the
picture "raw", even though it's overall 2d quality was poor. Times have
changed though, it's just too much of a hinderance to run such a card
these days.

However my big beef is WHAT software captures directly to 480x480
, looks good and is totally mpeg2 SVCD comapatible to the point I dont
have to do anything to it except maybe edit it for commercials?

Ive had two annoying problems.

1) Why is it that you can rip movies at 480x480 and they look great.
But when I capture even at 480x480 I can get some artifacts etc?
If I capture in higher format it looks fine but its not svcd
compatible and I have problems in tmpgenc trying to convert it.
The fact I can capture at a higher rate and it comes out fine seems to
suggest its not the card. Or maybe it is.

Each chipset has a native resolution that must be rescaled. Offhand I
don't recall what it is per chip but I don't think it's 480x480 for any of
them, typically 352x240 or 704x480, IIRC. The chip manufacturer's
datasheets should tell you that, but various online 'sites can
occasionally provide erroneous info.