TV card advice needed

[Slick]

Right, I'm just getting everything sorted for uni and instead of getting a TV liscence I'm considering just getting a TV card as I've heard these can't be traced by the TV blokey's equipment and would work out cheaper.

An internal card would be preferable so it's not obvious and it'd be handy if I could record onto my hard drive, I've seen ones which encode in mpeg 2, are there any that will do it in mpeg 4 or divx? Also one of the digital cards with freeview channels may be worth a look into, but am I likely to need a new ariel to get a decent reception? (I'll be in edinburgh city centre). Also are those ones which can pause TV any good?

Would it also be possible to put the sound output from these cards through my audigy 2 so I can digital output to my amp? I'd also be playing through a DVI connection to my samsung 171p.

Any advice or links to decent cards would be appretiated

[elneckio]

I remember seeing a usb digital tv one that had built in encoding recently, I think hauppage make it - might be worth checking out.

Also when I bought a card a couple of years back the shop asked for name and address and a few weeks later a letter turns up asking to confirm that we had a tv licence - we did so it wasn't a problem, but you might want to bear this in mind before buying one!

[Ethos]

I bought one and gave them my home address..... I live away from home when I'm at uni (where my pc is with the tv card).

Clever aren't I?

[Ceryndrion]

I bought one in pc world, and they didnt care two hoots

[Slick]

lol but does anyone have any suggestions which card I should get?

[SilentDeath]

most important thing is dont get a huppage pinnicle or other rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe one. i recommend mercury tv tuner from cpu city (analoge tv + fm radio + remote). mine was second hand tough, so if u want some money back im looking for a replacement remote
ive also got a semi-decent card u can have cheap but no sound in win2k/xp because of driver support and lacks some features of newer ones.

cards using philips saa7130 and the beter versions of the decoder are good imo. www.kobian.com makes mercury tv tuner = mine.
also stay away form ones using connextant/bt8x8 chips, they lack features and unstable.

www.tv-cards.com has some reviews, not very usefull, but there forums are ok.

if ur pc is metal with no window, the tuner will be shielded from rfi outside ur case, and also the opposite so it will make hard to trace, but i doubt that would compleatly stop that as tv cards basicly work in same way as tv. i wouldnt bother with tv licence really, they would have any evidence without looking in pc, and tv cards r rare.

digital tv will be getting better soon, new channels etc... but id wait till the cards get cheaper - one wiht the phillips saa7130 chip should be good (both analoge and digi depending on tuner used)

dont other with an external one, they r carp. quality is worse cos of mpeg2 with low bitrate.

encoding really depends on the software. and some cards will only work with the bundled soft (digi ones only work with bundled soft, i think, cos they work different). digi ones dont need to be encoded the tv stream they recive is already mpeg2.
none i know of can do hardware mpeg4 or its close relatives - divx/xvid. but if u use soft some can do it on the fly if u got codecs installed. others will simply give u uncompressed avi or mpeg1. if ur using fat32 for ur disks then uavi is pointless cos ull easly go over the 4gb boundry in 30mins of hq. also avi doesnt like over 2gb, and earlyer versions dont like over 1gb :/

timeshift - aka pausing tv is.. rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishe. most cards have bad drivers that dont implement this well. for example on mine the decoder chip outputs directly to the audio in on my soundcard. the drivers do not tell the decoder its in timeshift and just diverts the video to the mpeg1 encoder chip to save it for timeshift, the sound just carrys on out of sync with the mpeg1 chip. but timeshift is not as good as its suppost to b anyway.

definatly get a card that has its own audio out, the pci bus isnt good for sound (tv cards are based around chips, they can be used very differently). if u get one without then drivers from other manufactureres probly wont give u sound - my old card cant be used in win2k/xp cos of this.

they come with a cable to link to sound card.

if u want good analoge reception get cable tv for a month or 2, when they take it away ull be left with the cable but without the descramler box, u can still connect it up, but all the good channels will be scrabmled, rest will be perfect quality. my tv card can also descrable = free cable, but it gets very hot and the picture gets scrambled again, watercooling needed here

[Austin]

Well dodging a TV license is hardly commendable ... you could have made up some lame excuse at least. Since none of us are perfect and I'm sure we all think you're simply joking here's some advice...

To get digital TV you will definitely need a good quality aerial, ie High Gain (IIRC). Those things aren't discrete either. Big advantages are they're already in digital MPEG2 form so easily spun off to HD with little hw or CPU req'd AND 30+ channels which are generally either 100% perfect (no snow nor fuzz) or simply AWOL. Unfort you really should look only at std analogue TV cards, but you should find some real bargains second hand ... new ones are very cheap too but then most are pretty basic too. For the al cheapo cards like PCTV Rave you will likely need a CPU well over 1ghz and don't even think about time-shifting (ie watch and record & 'pausing' TV).

[SilentDeath]

Austin good info on digi tv

u cant get digi tv that u pay for with a tv card, unless its an analoge card with a sky box etc..
freeview has 15 chans iirc, 4 more are coming soon?
ariel needs to be poinitng at local transmitter, and u might not get all chans depending on it. ur right about the quality, its either all there or not there. tv cards are usually cheap, lowest quality things u can get for pc, so dont get a pctv rave! the mercury one i mentioned is only £25 at cpu city! and the one i have for sale say.. £12 inc delivery anyone? ill offer anyone £7inc for a (new condition) mercury tv tuner remote, i dont need the IR reciver thingy. = £18 for a decent tv card/fm radio from cpu city if u sell me the remote

i don c any reson not to get a digi or combo tv card, there are some decent digi ones and the price is falling.

cpu usage depends mainly on one thing - overlays. this is mainly gfx card dependant, probly more on drivers than hardware. if u use overlays what happens is the tv card writes each frame to ram using DMA, windows sets the gfx card to simply use this mem as part of the frame that gets outputted. without overlays the tv card does exactly the same, exept instead of windows giving the gfx card the mems address, it gives it the contents of the adresses, which eats up the cpu as it transfers it over to gfx card mem. recording to hard disk is incredibly slow without overlays as the cpu has to write to disk and gfx mem at same time, using double the bandwidth of the pci bus if its uncompressed, or more cpu cycles if it compresses it first, but less b/w of pci cos its compressed. max b/w on pci bus is 133mb/s btw, which isnt very much
aslong as uve got overlays timeshifting should be fine on any card, as long as its not done in uncopressed avi, which it never is (this feature only appeared when mpeg1 started getting used).
my hdd led goes about once every 3 seconds in mpeg for an instant, in avi its on almost constantly.

if u get a cheap pctv rave u will probly only be able t watch/record in 352x288 instead of 720x576 due to the crappyness of the ADC having low picture quality or something.

tv cards are very cheap, unless ur getting a digi or analoge+digi one. dont bother with second hand ones unless its a decent one. ive found that the best ones are made by almost unheard of companys making a one off product - they only have one tv card in there range that does almost everything probly using a philips or connextant/bt8x8 chip. these will also usually only make one driver set, based heavily on the decoder chips referenace drivers.

decoder chip is the most important part of the tv card. it converts analoge to digital (ADC) so best qualit will be ne that samples with most bits. mercury one is 9bit which is plenty

[Gristy]

38 freeview i thought or thats at least what it said on nova-t spec i think im gonna go for the leadtek card.

[Slick]

cheers for the links and posts guys, after reading up on this it seems that the TV guy picks up signals from the internal Oscillator and their equipment is now sensitive enough to detect this inside a computer case so it seems I'm probably gonna have to pay up.

It seems stupid though as my family allready have 2 TV licences, I'll only be living there half the year, I rarely watch it (1-2 hours a week) and would be more than happy to not tune my tv into the bbc channels (correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this what the license pays for?). I may just go without as an alternative. Thanks again though

[Austin]

http://www.freeview.co.uk/whatson/index.html

BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, CH4, CH5, (S4C in Wales), (S4C2 in Wales), BBC3, BBC4, ITV2, FTN, UK Bright Ideas, UK History, CBBC, Cbeebies, TMF, The Hits, Sky Travel, TV Travel Shop, QVC, Bid-Up, BBC Paliament, BBCi, Community, Freeplay, Teletext(?), BBC News24, Sky News, ITV News and Sky Sports News. That's 28 channels (2 more in Wales) and there's also at least a dozen digital radio stations offering crystal clear clarity. As said you may not be able to pick them all up though, they're usually aranged in 'bands of 5' (IIRC).

All digital broadcasts that you can pick through an aerial (high quality rem) are completely free. The only ones you're likely to pick up from cable or Sky are the unencrypted minimum package type ones, maybe all but premium and pay-per-view if you're very lucky.

They should all use MPEG2 by default making many things easier. MPEG2 is simpler to encode than AVI/MPEG4 but eats up a lot more storage space (esp for audio). You can always convert it to DivX/MPEG4 AVI or simply convert the audio if you wish to later anyway.

[Slick]

Originally posted by Austin
All digital broadcasts that you can pick through an aerial (high quality rem) are completely free

Completely free as in no tv license?

[fondie]

Originally posted by Slick
It seems stupid though as my family allready have 2 TV licences, I'll only be living there half the year, I rarely watch it (1-2 hours a week) and would be more than happy to not tune my tv into the bbc channels (correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this what the license pays for?). I may just go without as an alternative. Thanks again though

you should be able to get the 3 months over the summer holidays of your tv license fee refunded if you're not going to be there during that time.

you need a tv license to recieve any televisual broadcasting, not just the bbc.

universities are prime targets for the tv licensing people to target.

why does you family have 2 licenses??

[fondie]

Originally posted by Austin
All digital broadcasts that you can pick through an aerial (high quality rem) are completely free. The only ones you're likely to pick up from cable or Sky are the unencrypted minimum package type ones, maybe all but premium and pay-per-view if you're very lucky.

where did you read this ?? i am very sceptical !

edit:- i'm guessing your referring to not having to pay any further subscription over the tv license, so yes, freeview is indeed free you won't get too many channels without a viewing card on sky though.

[Austin]

Yeah the digital (through an aerial) signals are there to be plucked but you still need a TV license to view them just like you do for the analogue signals. Basically there is no type of encrypted channels 'in the air' and there are no monthly fees to pay either, once you have a digi-box (aerial) or digital TV card (and have a TV license) you are free to view all channels (you can pick up).

fondie what are you sceptical of? If it isn't addressed above then I assume it was about trying to pick up cable or Sky signals through your TV card. Someone mentioned you may pick them up above so I was just touching on the point (basically don't expect to get encrypted channels). I have also heard many Americans stating they can pick up many of the cable channels. You obviously need a dish for Sky but also I imagine you simply split the output from your Sky digibox and send one to your TV (as normal) and the other to your PC. For cable it should be simpler, you may find connecting the little output box on the wall up to your TV card is enough, otherwise you can simply do the splitting thing from the back of your cable box. You may get more joy from areas where the analogue cable signals are still present. I seem to rem an age ago I did get my TV to pick up channels 1-5 using a Y splitter from my cable box (analogue IIRC) as I didn't have any TV aerial at the time so needed a signal for my second TV. I don't think there's any legal ramifications to that. Anyway I am simply stating my thoughts on what/how someone could these things rather than saying go and do it or that it is always perfectly legal if you catch my drift.

[Slick]

Originally posted by fondie
you should be able to get the 3 months over the summer holidays of your tv license fee refunded if you're not going to be there during that time.

I'll try to do that then

Originally posted by fondie
why does you family have 2 licenses??

We allready have 2 cos we have 2 properties, a house in Durham and flat in Leeds, we still keep getting letters sent to the flat though asking about tv licenses even though we've had one since we moved in.

Originally posted by fondie
you need a tv license to recieve any televisual broadcasting, not just the bbc.

I know but I was pointing out that's stupid because doesn't it just fund the bbc and none of the other channels? my point was I would be happy to live without the bbc and not pay the license