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Hey, I'm looking for a decent Digital TV Tuner, a few points though:
1: Preferably Dual Tuner so i can record and watch,
2: Needs to have S-Video input, as I plan to play my Xbox via the Card,
3: Also, need it to be as cheap as possible....
Was looking at this card @ Scan: Leadtek WinFast DTV2000 H
What’s the advantage's with Hybrid cards (Digital and Analogue), over just Digital cards?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Paul
Hybrid cards tend to offer more in the way of Video inputs......S-Video/Composite etc., and I believe this is far better suited to other sources such as PS2, Xbox etc.....just note that the Analogue part is rarely 'hardware encoding' so MCE (if you are using it !) will likely only see the Digital part.
I have an Avermedia Hybrid PCI TV Tuner and it works fine in MCE (DVB-T) and both analogue and digital in 'regular' XP Pro. Great card, no probs whatsoever, replaced a KWorld hybrid which gave various MCE probs :(
I have a Hauppauge HVR-1300MCE. Hybrid Digital/Analog (with hardware MPEG2 encoding for the Digital side), has s-video and composite inputs and comes with a Microsoft XP Media Center compatible remote control.
Only one tuner but you *can* combine two or more cards if you want, you may not have to have two the same either so you could get a cheap basic secondary digital card as well. The one thing I will say tho is that as yet I've not been able to get my PS2 to work right through the S-Video input, there's about a 3 second delay between what i do on the control pad and anything happening on screen. Also, the quality of the picture with the PS2 in the S-Video is rubbish, presumably because it's scaling everything up from the PAL resolution output of the console. I tried a bunch of different cards and PS2-VGA adaptors and they're all the same unfortunately.
That said tho for what it is (a good single-tuner hybrid DVB/Analog TV card) it is very good, I've used it with MCE and standard XP with MediaPortal with no problems at all. It's going in my planned HTPC along with my current mobo, CPU etc. when I get round to upgrading this general purpose machine :)
Check out the DVico FusionHDTV - it is gaining an awsome reputation and has been declaired Premium Grade by Custom PC as the winner of their latest Lab Test, and the runner up (but quite a way behind) is the Leadtek Winfast DTV1000T