Hi folks, For the HTPC I'm building my lady-friend I need a DVB-T tuner compatible with GBPVR. There's a list here of natively supported cards. Does anyone recommend any particular card? I really want it to have hardware MPEG2 encoding/decoding too if poss. TIA for any help
Hauppage, Pinacle and Terratec are generally the best regarded TV cards (afaik), go for one of those, or even most of the ones on the list, and you'll be sorted.
Cool, thx krikkit. Any easy way to work out which ones have MPEG2 hardware on them? Other than the price...
dvb-t cards do not have hardware encoding, as the signal in the UK is broadcast in mpeg2. I would recommend the hauppuage range as these have 2 year warranties and good support and a uk forum for help, most tv card manufacturers from china or taiwan don't even have a valid email address. I use gbpvr (2 pcs) with 6 tuners and 5 of these are hauppauge cards and 3 of the 6 are nova-t's.
Very little problems otherwise I would never had got 3 of them, i'm toying with the idea of getting the nova-t 500 dual tuner card.
do not get pinnacle, really dont. I brought a MCE300i and it is a pain, they never supported BDA drivers untill recently, and its just like i just wouldnt recommend it. the forum is a joke, getting any form of support is pointless too (eg, drivers etc, forum, software etc)
ebuyer's a good place to get anything pc-related cheap generally. Otherwise, give it a froogle - that's always a safe option.
Having had many haupauge cards I would not recommend them, software is flaky, instead I would consider a Nebula card its on the list and is very good, though looking at that stuff you'll be using your own software so may not be an issue what card you have. http://www.nebula-electronics.com/products/products.asp?class=DigiTV
Having a nebula card, I would say don't waste your money on it, for that price you can get either 2 cards or a dual tuner card. The software is better out of the box than most granted, but its flakey and nebula add features that introduce new bugs, if they would only fix the bugs first instead of adding more features. You can achieve nearly everything with a nova-t and free third party software for 1/2 the price. And if you use linux you can even have mheg5 (interactive) support if you want it. I use the BDA drivers of nebula instead of the actual digitv application. The only reason I would recommend Nebula over any other product is the Mheg5 and the audio desciption feature.
Thanks for the info guys, I have the tuner card here already. I went for the Nova-T since I think It'll do everything my girlfriend asks of it.
