HTPC Choosing a TV Tuner card for MCE2005

Afternoon folks,

I'm planning on upgrading my PC soon, and will be making a Media Center PC out of the old remains.

Media Center is going to contain a 3Ghz P4, 1Gig Ram, probably 2 x 250Gb Hds, ATI Radeon x800 XTPE, and will be running MCE 2005 on a 32" Widescreen TV

The only thing I'm not too sure on is what kind of (brand/type) tv tuner card to get. I'd like to pickup Freeview, and be able to record one channel, whilst watching another - so will most likely need 2 tuner cards. I would like the image quality to be as good as possible, and will be using only XP MCE2005

Is there much difference between hardware and software encoding - i know one is far more intense on the CPU...

Any suggestions would be welcome! Thanks in advance...

Muddy

 

Welcome to Bit forums, MuddyFunk,

Check out this recent thread. TBH, these days I'd go for a digital-only card and forget analogue, reception permitting. And as herbs says, very few Freeview cards have hardware decoding, and the digital signal's already encoded, but the CPU load is usually fairly low.

 

There's no encoding so to speak from freeview. The cards just rip out the mpeg2 stream from the air and record it to your harddisk so as long as you dont intend to hammer the disk with streaming this that and and everything whilst you try to record you should be fine. It's then TRANScoding that multigigabyte file into something smaller, if you intend to keep the recording, that is a CPU killer.

Check out the terratec card: PCIe dual tuner. Ive heard good things and there *should* be a review due on this site sometime in the near future (wavey hands dont know when).

 

Nope I never said any dvb-t card had a hardware encoder, I did state that I knew of one dvb-t card that hardware decoder. This is a old board so I doubt it would be easy to find nowdays.

The terratec card is a pci-e card that might be useful if you have pci-e slots but there are suppose to be some issues with lost signals etc see here for the pro and cons.

 

Thank you very much guys, you've been a great help! As you can probably tell I'm only just starting to learn about putting a media center together, so dont know much at present. I'll have a read up on the different cards that are mentioned in the threads, and then make a decision!!! WOOO!

Who would have thought i didnt need a hardware decoder when receiving freeview...sweet!

 

Ok, so i'm thinking the Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-t PCI Freeview Receiver looks like a pretty good deal - I am presuming I'll be able to buy two of these and install them both, so i can record, whilst watching something else. Any other hardware that I'll need to do that? Something to split the Freeview signal into two and amplify it perhaps??

 

Isn't that what I put? "the digital signal's already encoded"

Sorry for any confusion.

 

Oh crap I said encoder and you said decoder, either way I meant decoder. I'm the one who fecked up not you, accept my apologises for the confusion.

 

Now I'm confused! The WinTV-Nova-t PCI Freeview Receiver would be a fine card to get then?

And i could x2 of them??

 

Yep, and yep. I have 3 nova-t's working in gbpvr although different models, and my brother has 2 of the same (90002 versions) working with mediaportal.

 

Great! I shall probably go for those, and get my mce2005 running nicely...

thanks for the help..much appreciated,