What is a good TV-card?

KillJoy

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Dec 31, 2007
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Hi!

I am looking for a good tv-card...
Main purpose is to watch some tv from the usual cable (no satelite of antenna)
I have 2 monitors connected to my pc (the main, 19' and a second 15') the 15' is connected to a 4mb PCI card.
Any idea if it is possible to display tv image on this screen fluently?

So.. Advice on what card is good and not overpriced (up to 200$) or other remaks are very welcome!!

Thx!!
 

the_Prisoner

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Nov 17, 2002
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If you just want basic TV watching a card from Hauppage for about $45.00 would be fine. If you need other things like PVR and video capture, Hauppage and Pinnacle Systems make great cards and they have been making them for a number of years. For video editing Pinnacle is probably better.
<A HREF="http://www.pinnaclesys.com/VideoEditing.asp?langue_id=7" target="_new">http://www.pinnaclesys.com/VideoEditing.asp?langue_id=7</A>

<A HREF="http://www.hauppauge.com" target="_new">http://www.hauppauge.com</A>

I have used both companies. I would suggest a card with hardware decoding. It will free up your CPU!

the Prisoner

I'm not a number, I'm a free man! :mad:
 

DeepBluethe

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Jun 30, 2003
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Are you happy with Leadtek's capture performance? Leadtek seems the best TV card for my budget. And also Pinnacle tv cards, are avaliable where I live, for around ~70$. I can still force myself to afford the Pinnacle but Im not sure if the difference will worth for it.

Any Ideas?

KillJoy, sorry I have shared your topic. In your sitiation, if you are not interested in capturing, most of the TV Cards around 70$-80$(at most) will do your job. You dont need to spend that much. The new generation tv-cards with CX2388x chips will slightly have a better image quality but low software support. BT8x8 chipset cards are still has satisfaying quality and great software support...
 

kmiller

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Apr 6, 2003
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The capture performance meets my needs. Since I am burning my captures on CD, not DVD, my quality is good. The best quality takes up much space - too much for a CD. If I had a DVD burner, I could use the best quality.
A cool feature w/ the Leadtek card is the TitanTV internet schedule feature. The tv schedule for your area is set on the web site - all you have to do to record a show is click the EPG button on the WinFastPVR to go to the web site schedule, find the show and click the record icon next to the show name and it puts it into the WinFastPVR Schedule to be automatically recorded.

I capture w/ the WinFastPVR, then encode w/ TMPGEnc (freeware), then burn disk w/ VCDEasy (freeware) - all works great. You can also burn w/ Nero, Roxio, etc.
 

the_Prisoner

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Nov 17, 2002
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The Hauppage will do that also, plus there seems to less problems with the Hauppage card.

Having hardware compression nice, otherwise you wont be able to do much with your computer without it while capturing.

Pris

I'm not a number, I'm a free man! :mad: