Digital TV card - What to choose?

[Emirzan]

I'm looking for a TV card to add to my PC and have little experience of which ones are good and bad so would appreciate some recommendations. It doesn't have to be a low profile card since it's going in a full size ATX case and I'm not bothered if it comes with a remote or not. The most important points are that it has a decent digital tuner and is able to cope with HDTV. Budget isn't too restrictive but I'd prefer to pay less than £50. If anyone could point me to a reliable source of reviews that would also be helpful.

[jackvdbuk]

blackgold are highly rated but expensive, also note that before you buy one make sure its 64bit compat.

even if your not 64bit now, 4 years down the line you dont really wanna have ot change the tv card becuase of drivers.

[RavenNight]

The Compro ones work well in my experience, but I don't know about HD performance, I've used them in several builds and never had a problem.

[floppybootstomp]

I have his one Hauppage T-500 digital twin tuner.

It's very good. Using it with Win XP Pro.

[frazered]

I have his one Hauppage T-500 digital twin tuner.

It's very good. Using it with Win XP Pro.

had this one and it was pants compared to my Pinnacle 3010X - a whole 18 quid at the time from play.com

the Hauppage one was not too great at waking the htpc to record and often blue screened. tried all the latest and beta drivers - got sick, sold it for near new price on ebay and found the Pinnacle card to be very reliable. 'er indoors was made up with the htpc being able to record Hollyoaks and Corrie reliably!

[synaesthesia]

I swore by Hauppage (sp?) for many a year putting up with the annoying software however literally found a pci express card by AverMedia and it's absolutely fantastic - dual tuner freeview/analogue although it doesn't do HD decoding, but it is fairly old. I'd imagine the new ones are fairly good too, but they do appear to be fairly rare :/

[floppybootstomp]

had this one and it was pants compared to my Pinnacle 3010X - a whole 18 quid at the time from play.com

the Hauppage one was not too great at waking the htpc to record and often blue screened. tried all the latest and beta drivers - got sick, sold it for near new price on ebay and found the Pinnacle card to be very reliable. 'er indoors was made up with the htpc being able to record Hollyoaks and Corrie reliably!

Sorry to hear that, I've had no problems with mine at all, remote control is good, picture quality is excellent and it records well.

This is the spec of the machine it's in, I only use it as a media centre:

Asus MV2 Sli Motherboard
AMD AM2 XP4000 Single Core 2.6Ghz
Zalman CNPS8000 cooler
2Gb OCZ DDR2 6400C5 Memory
BFG Nvidia 7600GT 256Mb
2 x Samsung 500Gb HDD's
Hauppage Nova T-500 Twin Digital PCI TV Tuner Card
Thermaltake Bach Media Silver Aluminium Desktop case
Asus DVD ROM Drive
Liteon DVDRW
A Floppy drive
Audigy 2 Soundcard
Jeantech 350W PSU

I also have a very old Pinnacle TV card in another machine but it's analogue only, I use it mostly as a Video capture device, that's been good as well.

[Sputnik]

even if your not 64bit now, 4 years down the line you dont really wanna have ot change the tv card becuase of drivers.

You should have told me that 4 years ago! I bought a Nebula and now it looks like there will be no drivers for Vista 64.

[synaesthesia]

I had a Nebula card previous to this, the beta x64 drivers worked alright for it...

[this_is_gav]

I have his one Hauppage T-500 digital twin tuner.

It's very good. Using it with Win XP Pro.

I've got the pictured one, but keep in mind that the one pictured isn't the same as the card you get (at least with the stock Scan had 4-6 weeks back). The Nova-T is pictured, but the Nova-TD is a different card - shorter, and with 2 inputs (though you can still use only the 1 socket and it gets split internally).

I've still not done enough testing to see if it's any different to the older Nova-T. Got one in my HTPC, one in my main PC.

The original is certainly a good card - better than the (now broken) Terratec 2400i DT card it replaced.

I posted this here around a month back, but it's disappeared, somewhat oddly.

[Sputnik]

I had a Nebula card previous to this, the beta x64 drivers worked alright for it...

Was that with Vista or XP ?

[Camrada]

Has anyone got or looked at the HVR-3000 or HVR-4000, would either of these be recommendable in dealing with HDTV, as per original post...?

[bogart]

The Compro Tech Videomate models are listed as Vista 64 certified but only for memeory not exceeding 3GB! Info was from manufacturer.

[Emirzan]

Thanks for the suggestions, the best sources for info that I've found are AV forum and this thread about HTPC equipment selection on hardforum. Currently I'm looking at the Hauppauge Nova T 500.

Blackgold products look good too but there are people reporting a lot of problems on AV forum, not to mention how expensive they are!

[frazered]

my main issue with the nova t 500 was that it behaved as a usb device - i.e. on wake it would bing bong each time and sometimes it was not found. pretty annoying as it is a pci card and I think this was the root of the issues I had with it.

[synaesthesia]

Was that with Vista or XP ?

Was Vista. Did have trouble finding the software - I can try and find a link if you're still hunting for them, failing that I can email the files over or something.