I'm interested in sticking one of these into my main PC and was wondering what the current best value for money one is? I'm not especially interested in fancy features, just something that has good drivers and lets me watch (and possibly record) television on my PC. Hardware decoding is preferable, but if that comes at a huge premium then I'll pass it up. Thanks in advance
Oooh, me too, I've been meaning to ask this. Although I'm probably after a USB one - are these as good as their PCI counterparts? Also, I already have a remote so I don't need that, and I'm running Media Portal, so it'd have to be compatible with that. I am a bit wary of TV cards because I had one ages ago and it made my PC very unstable. I took it back and got a different one and the same thing happened. But I guess things have improved somewhat since then (5+years ago).
I bought a Freecom usb stick to test the water and suffice to say the signal around my area is nearly next to non-existent. Anyway, I picked up about four BBC channels through the old aerial at home and they were extremely good quality picture-wise. I could only pick up c-beebies at work, but the picture quality was spot on!
Just on value for money, and for Freeview only, I'd say the Hauppauge Nova T will take some beating. I got the PCI version when PC-World were selling them very cheap (£40), now they've gone back up and I think the USB one is now the cheaper of the two (at PCW). They come with a remote, but AFAIK their remote won't work with MediaPortal (but the card will). Good picture, no problems, does what it says on the box, old enough to be well supported by alternative software.
The remote does work with mediaportal I have used the hauppauge remote fine with it. Hitman012: Freeview (dvb-t) signals are already encoded at the broadcasters end so no dvb-t card had hardware encoding, I know you say decoder but I'm guessing your getting mixed up on that side. If you truely m,ean hardware decoder I know of only one card that does this and is a dvb-t card and that isn't cheap. My advice is to get a card that has BDA drivers this will mean alot of third party applications will support as well as windows media centre. The nova-t (ebuyer do it for £40 still) is a good card like cpemma mention but it does not have composite/s-vid in ports so if you have old vidoes you wish to capture to hard drive than you will not have this option. The blackgold dvb-t cards have a good reputation, also the winfast dvt1000 had a fairly good write up on this very site all can be had for £40-50 ish. My advice is to stay away from avermedia products unless you enjoy pain.
The nebula cards are meant to be the dogs. I had the PCI version for a day before sending it back. It wouldn't tune but apparently you aren't meant to use the PCI version with any Silicon Image sata/raid controllers, so it was probably my fault rather than the card being crap. http://www.nebula-electronics.com/ Has some cool features like direct mpeg2 capture (just drops the stream to disk rather than encodes) and capping multiple channels from the same mux (ie BBC1 and BBC2 at the same time). When I've got a bit more cash I might give the USB version a go.
Since my graphics card already has S-Video in, I think I'll take this cheaper choice. I'm not too interested in capturing old videos, just a bit of recording with the card and watching TV. Thanks to everyone for the advice
I wouldn't bother the nebula's software is always flakey, I have owned a nebula for over 3 years now but in my view the software has some nice features but it's just not worth the extra price. You can buy two dvb-t cards for the price of the nebula and have two channels recording at once, or if you use got all media record two muxes at the same time. The newer version of the nebula is suppose to have less of a problem with the SI sata controllers. Also all dvb-t cards record the stream as the broadcaster broadcasts in mpeg2 (some use mpeg4 i.e france pay to view) format.
EBuyer pricing: Hauppage Nova-T = £50.05 Freecom DVB-T = £38.32 They both do pretty much exactly the same thing.
Ebuyer nova-t = 39.93 clicky here Also the freecom device does not have native BDA drivers you have to use another manufacturer drivers to get it to work with BDA programs.
