What USB Freeview tuner thingie....

hey guys n gals,

what with some form of football tournament on soon, ive been thinking of getting a USB Freeview tuner for my laptop.
i want it to have its own arial, and a remote if poss

any models that can be recommended??

thanking you in advance

I've got the MSI Megasky 580 and it's great, comes with a remote and is Media Centre compliant. The aerial that comes with all of these USB tuners are absolutely useless unless you're in a very strong signal area. I live about 10 miles from my local transmitter and can only pick up about a quarter of the channels but even they continually break up. Connected to my roof aerial though it's rock solid.

Thanks for responding so quickly :bowdown:

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Originally Posted by killie99

Connected to my roof aerial though it's rock solid.

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an excellent plan with only 2 tiny drawbacks...

A) my workplace doesnt have an external arial
and
B) my workplace doesnt have an external arial :mrgreen:

hence why i would like an arial to be included.

Yep, you really need an external ariel to make the most of these things.
I've got the Leadtek Winfast DTV one - great piece of hardware for recording from a good ariel, but the software can be a bit buggy at times. However, I'm currently using it with a below-spec cpu (XP1700+), and they do use up quite a lot of processor power to encode, so, that might be causing the odd problem that I've had, and not the software.
Haven't tried the rubber-sucker supplied ariel, so can't comment on that one.
Recording quality from an external ariel is superb, however.
The Leadtek one has a good software bundle - lite versions of Ulead Videostudio 9/DVD Movie Factory 4/Cool 3D/Muvee 3/PowerDVD.

S.

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Originally Posted by digitalis

Yep, you really need an external ariel to make the most of these things.
I've got the Leadtek Winfast DTV one - great piece of hardware for recording from a good ariel, but the software can be a bit buggy at times. However, I'm currently using it with a below-spec cpu (XP1700+), and they do use up quite a lot of processor power to encode, so, that might be causing the odd problem that I've had, and not the software.

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sorry, but that's just wrong.

DVB-T transmits MPEG2 streams directly. the CPU required is negligable - you just need to either dump to disk, or display the image (which should be fine on any DVD-capable PC)

Well my TV card (when it works) certianly pounds the CPU when its recording.

thanks for all the help

i'm gonna go for the MSI jobbie... its less than £30 so i cant go wrong really (i hope)

A friend of mine had the same problem with not having a fixed aerial at his work - he tried wiring it to his metal filing cabinet and it worked fine :lol: YMMV!

funny you should say that...

the outside of our building is metal, and the msi ariel has a magnet on it...

just shoved it as high as we could - got a load of channels

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Originally Posted by RavenNight

Well my TV card (when it works) certianly pounds the CPU when its recording.

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then it's probably transcoding as it records - which is pointless, since the input signal is already a reasonable mpeg2 image.

recording two input signals at once, my mythtv box uses about 5% cpu maximum - but hammers the disk.