Help me find a good TV tuner card

GobdGobd Seattle, WA
edited November 2003 in Hardware
OK, i know nothing about TV tuner cards but what i think i want is a TV/FM tuner card that can record TV and encode it (preferably the card itself would encode, not my CPU). I would be running cable TV right to the card. I assume that a TV tuner card can be used like Tivo, but i'm not sure so please tell me if it can't do this. I'd also like to be able to listen to the radio with it, but i'm not sure if they even have cards that do that :) I'd also like one that came with a remote so i could change the TV and radio channel without haveing to use the mouse or keyboard.

As i said before, i know nothing about these cards so any info at all would help no matter how basic it is.

Oh, my price range is anything less than 100$.

Comments

  • OlivasOlivas Phoenix
    edited November 2003
    Take a look at the Leadtek Winfast tv2000 xp deluxe. It can do all the things you asked for and it is only $45 from newegg with free shipping.

    http://www.leadtek.com.tw/multimedia/winfast_tv2000xp_1.shtml
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited November 2003
    get an AIW 9700 Pro for $300, like me :-D

    now that the taunting is over, i know someone with that Winfast card Olivas pointed out, it works pretty well
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    I put one of the Leadtek Winfast tv2000 XP Deluxe cards in my wifes machine and it works quite well.
  • GobdGobd Seattle, WA
    edited November 2003
    That seems like it will work perfect then, i read a few reviews and it seems like the picture quality and feature set are more than enough for me. The price is especially good, only 45$ with free shipping from newegg.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited November 2003
    That is a real good price. I paid $74.00 last winter. :(
  • DocanoDocano Texas
    edited November 2003
    I'm sorry but I can't help but recommend a Hauppage capture card! They seem a bit pricey, but you can catch them on sale at different sites all the time. I've owned a Hauppage WinTV-PVR 250 for going on three years, and I love it. Almost as important as its excellent video clarity and low distortion, it's compatible with every OS I've used in the past three years: Win98, Win2K, WinXP, and even several Linux distros. The PVR models all have the TiVO features too, like pausing live video, scheduling times to record shows, and MPEG-2 compression that's easily transferrable to DVDs. The remote control is a nice additional touch and works surprisingly well, too~.

    http://www.hauppauge.com/html/products.htm#pvr

    The PVRs are listed on hauppage's page between $100 and $200, but you can find the WinTV-PVR-250MCE, for example, for under $100 (it's listed as $149 at hauppage.com) if you do some searching.
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited November 2003
    *
  • Red-SquirrelRed-Squirrel Ontario, Canada
    edited November 2003
    This is not really a card but does the job you need. The pinnacle bungee dvd. I have a review on my site that I wrote some time ago, I'm sure they have better versions of it now. only thing is that it also costed me like 200 bucks so that's over your budget, but what's nice is that it processes everything before entering the computer, and you get 48*48 reselution (yeah I know it's weird, but most editing programs will squeze it to 3:4 ratio anyway).

    I had a TV wonder and I would capture at 240*320 and it would be about 1GB per minute, this thing goes at 1GB per hour! seriously! You can have 1 hour of captured video only take up about 1GB, maybe a bit more. But it sounds like you mostly want to watch TV so this does not matter as much.

    Like most cards you can hook up the composites/super video or cable tv, and it has it's own sound interface so no need to hook up to your sound card.
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