Freeview PCI card

[rob4001]

Can anyone recommend me a decent freeview TV card?

Thanks

[alexkoon]

Any of the Hauppage cards are good and have good support driver wise and even on linux. Depends whether you want to PVR though. The more expensive cards have on board MPEG2 encoders so less stress on the CPU if you are recording.

[rob4001]

Thanks for the reply I was looking for PVR as well.

[adam1701]

I would reccomend Hauppage

I have a Nova-t personally.... its really good

[rob4001]

Thanks do you know if pinnacle are any good?

[Funkstar]

If you are looking for PVR functionality, then have a look at some of the free/open source projects out there.

Card manufacturer software often sucks quite badly, especially for the cheap cards. MediaPortal is my favourite right now. (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/)

A good solid card with good native software though is the Nebula DigiTV (http://www.nebula-electronics.com/).

I have a Nova-T 500 but only installed the drivers to use with MediaPortal, no idea what the Hauppauge software is like.

[toomanycooks]

Another vote for the Hauppauge Nova-T. I have two running with this:

www.gbpvr.com

[directhex]

The more expensive cards have on board MPEG2 encoders so less stress on the CPU if you are recording.

sorry, but this is wrong

freeview signals are already MPEG2. all the pc has to do is spool it to disk, or decode to display it to users.

[directhex]

my mythtv box runs a pair of nova-ts

it's worth pointing out that there are two versions of the nova-t: a conexant cx88xx-based one and an older philips saa71xx version.

ability to tune into all channels, and speed with which channels are changed, is quite different with these chipsets

[speardane]

very happy with my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1300 PCI.

seemed to work much better than an (admittedly cheaper) USB device I tried before.

need to look at the rest of the signal chain too, in my experience (and if necessary allow some of the budget for that too). You getting a digital signal over effectively an analogue medium until it arrives at the decoder & digital copes with degraded quality much less well than analogue