Hauppauge Nova-T display quality

[Theo]

I'm currently in the process of giving my HTPC another complete overhaul and have decided that I want to completely run everything from my PC through tv cards. I've half-gotten there with a Hauppage WinTV Go! card, but the quality isn't all that good, and certainly not upto the standard of a regular television.

Anyhow. I assume that the image quality of a DVB card would be far better than that of an analogue card? I've never experienced freeview (really!) and would like to integrate that into the system.

So if anyone has had any experience with the Nova-T cards, or perhaps any other DVB cards and has any comments or opinions regarding the quality of the output in comparison to that of a regular television, I'd greatly appreciate it. That's a long sentence.

[mr-nick]

DVB-T cards such as the Nova-T are pretty much 'dumb'; they just stream the broadcasts to your machine and it's the MPEG decoder which produces the image.

In the past I've used both the Black Gold and Nova-T cards with MCE and you can't tell the difference.

[Lee H]

2 Nova-T's here setup in my PC for MCE 2005

Picture Quality is fine and I'm using the Nvidia DVD decoder as the MPEG2 decoder.

[Theo]

Thanks for the replies guys. Much appreciated. However, I'm still unsure of what I'm going to do yet. I had the thought last night of just buying a PVR-350 or something similar plus a freeview device of some sort, and just using that as the main card, whereas the WinTV Go! can be used to view the television feed whilst the PVR-350 is recording.

I'm having a think about it more, I'm pricing up my options now. As far as I can see, if I buy the Nova-T cards, there's the possibility that I'll have to perform a few more upgrades (mobo, cpu etc) to be able to watch and record TV at the same time. Whereas a PVR-350 does most of the work itself, regarding recording. So my computer should manage it.

Gah!

[Theo]

Actually... I've just had ANOTHER though. (I'm on FIRE! )

Would the freeview device running into the regular television card require me to change the channel on the freeview device... or would I be able to change the channel on the computer? Hope that makes sense...

Any more advice is gratefully appreciated.

[mr-nick]

If you're running MCE and have the official remote kit then you can change channels on an external box that's hooked up to an analogue TV card via the supplied 'IR blaster'. Never done it myself but it is possible.

The horsepower required to record DVB-T streams in MCE is actually pretty small and I'd say the difference between decoding 'analogue' and 'digital' broadcasts would be minimal (if any) in terms of system performance.