What USB Freeview tuner thingie....

[dshepsman]

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

[killie99]

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.

[dshepsman]

Thanks for responding so quickly

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

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

hence why i would like an arial to be included.

[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.
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.

[directhex]

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.

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)

[RavenNight]

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

[dshepsman]

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)

[SourceQuench]

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 YMMV!

[dshepsman]

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

[directhex]

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

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.