Tuner Help

[paulbelk]

Any suggestions on what would be the best tuner card out there for my needs. There are a lot of opinions on cards but i'm looking for some suggestions that are a little more tailored to my needs.

I have a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 500 that they no longer support and it wont work at all with over 4 gigs of RAM & I won't be downgrading. They're only suggestion is to purchase one of their new cards but i'd rather not go with them again unless I have to. I don't like it when companys just stop supporting their products and their only response is to either remove RAM or buy a new card.

I want:
Dual Digital tuner
FM Radio (optional cause' I really don't use it that much but it's a nice perk)
PCI Slot (not PCI-E) or external. At this point I don't really care if it's in the box or not.

My setup that matters is as follows:
Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit (I know I should have upgraded for the XP emulator)
6 GIG's Ram. (will be going to 8 sometime in future).
Comcast Cable.

I don't know if anything else matters.

 

[paulbelk]

Dont double post.

Who's trying to double post? I merely put my question in the right section.

 

[photonboy]

There's a lot of different Tuners available so just see what's in your price range and read comments and reviews.

Unless you have a quiet HTPC I prefer to use a dedicated TV box.

I have a Satellite box that was $100 and I could add a USB hard drive to it for recording.

 

[paulbelk]

I hope someone else can give me some better advice than this. Can anyone else chime in here. Price is not the problem but it has to work with comcast cables current digital upgrade.

 

[rwpritchett]

It's not an easy question to answer.

Just off the top of my head, the HVR-2250 (sorry, it's made by Hauppauge) is the best TV tuner for a coax input. It has FM too. Next would be an HDHomerun Dual which is a network based TV tuner.

The problem is, we don't know what channels Comcast has unencrypted in your area and that will take a little research on your part. You might have to call Comcast directly and ask a tech what channels are broadcast in clearQAM, or unencrypted QAM. In some areas, Comcast has encrypted everything and a traditional tuner won't work. In others a lot of channels are clearQAM.

Probably out of your price range, but also a good option is a CableCard tuner like Ceton makes. With that card, you use a CableCard from Comcast and get all of your channels, encrypted or not.

If it will work in your area, the Hauppauge HVR-2250 is the best card for your situation.

 

[paulbelk]

Well, that's where I need some help. I need something internal or external that will work with Win7 64-Bit and comcast cable.

I know there are a lot of card out there that will work with Win7 64-bit, but, comcast recently did that stupid digital box upgrade crap and I have yet to see anyone post about which ones work with it. I see a lot of people complaining about their cards no longer working but I don't see any good answers yet.

SO, if anybody has a little more relative info on what works with Comcast and Win7 64-bit.

P L E A S E, by all means, let me know.

 

[Wolfshadw]

The above mentioned Hauppauge card will work with Comcast cable... sort of. If you use a set top box (from Comcast), the connect the output of the set top box to the input of the TV Tuner card. This essentially strips away the tv tuning capabilities of the tuner card and just makes it a video capture card.

If you do not have the set top box, then just connect the cable from the wall to the input of the TV tuner card. Since most Comcast channels are encrypted, your TV Tuner card will only pick up those few channels that are unencrypted.

The Ceton card mentioned above will work with Comcast as long as you have a cablecard from Comcast installed into it. SiliconDust (makers for the HDHomeRun mentioned above) is also working on a cablecard solution as well.

-Wolf sends