Looking for a TV Tuner

Tuners with software encoding can tie up your processor and slow your machine. The older and slower your processor is the more you need hardware encoding.

I've had good luck with TV tuner cards from Avermedia.

For several years I've been using an old UltraTV 500 card from them, and the picture quality was quite good. It also was fine at recording and playback.

That computer was running XP Pro, and with Avermedia's update driver, I had no problems at all.

Now I've built a new computer and I've got a dual boot, XP Pro/Vista Home Premium on it. The old card wouldn't run under Vista. Avermedia says it had no plans to support that old card, so when I wanted to use it, I had to boot into XP.

Just last week, I purchased an AverMedia GoTV 007 Plus at Fry's for $39. Lowest priced tuner they have. I checked the Avermedia site and they say it will run with Vista, but it's not what they call 'Vista Ready'. I believe it's actually been recently discontinued by Avermedia, but Fry's seems to have a good supply of them.

I've installed it, into both operating systems, and it works fine on both. In Vista, it exits out of the Aero Glass interface while it's running, and the remote control, which I never use anyway, doesn't work. But it records and plays back with no problems and the picture quality is again quite good.

Although the interface and operation of the new card seem quite similar to the old one, it seems to be a different type of tuner. Whereas the old card had the familiar metal 'can' tuner, this one seems to be digital and is a smaller card. Never the less, it works quite well...., especially for the price!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6815116310

How about this one? I like that it has its own HD antenna and another input for cable TV.

I bought one of the first Ati HD TV Cards like this one, I works ok for off the air HD TV. The second SD TV input has a bit of video noise on my system.
I gave 195 with a received 50 dollar US rebate, so it was $145 for me.

I have had driver issues with this card, and had to find the right combination of the 5 items of software that are needed to run this card.

Ati has almost no support for this card now, and I do not find any Vista drivers on the Ati site, at last check.

Also, I only have Win XP Pro so I do not know how well it works in media edition.

I saw the HDTV card on the ScreenSavers, it was an impulse buy.

I also have the Compro VideoMate TV Gold+ it an SDTV card that works very well, but it's older and out of support.

I will be looking for a TV card that has HDTV and SDTV, along with support for XP/Vista and MythTV for Linux.

A hardware encoding card is definately preferable for any PC. I've had success with this card (single tuner) over the past year. If you want to record one show while watching another or record two shows simultaneously, you would need a dual tuner card like this.

http://www.gbpvr.com is a great piece of free software for recording TV.

I would definately get a card with hardware encoding. makes a big diffrence when you're trying to multi-task. I tried an ati card once (don't remember the model) that had software encoding after using a leadtek 2000 something card that had hardware encoding and the performance difference was pretty massive.

I currently went back to a leadtek hardware encoding card (check my sig.)
Not the best of cards, but it does everything i need it too without much of a performance hit. gl