MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV

Fifth Place: NVIDIA NVTV

NVIDIA's NVTV launched alongside Media Center Edition 2005 as the first single-slot, dual tuner PCI card with MCE 2005 support.  Despite the fact that it is a NVIDIA branded TV tuner, it uses a pair of LSI DVXPLORE codecs.  These are the same codecs used on the eMuzed Maui board. However, given the large difference in image quality between the two boards, we'd say that NVIDIA's digital tuners are responsible for NVIDIA's 5th place showing in this comparison. 

The convenience of having two tuners on a single PCI card is outweighed by the fact that the NVTV produced the most grainy image out of any of the cards in this comparison.  The graininess was very detectable during normal viewing and it definitely impacted the experience. 

NVTV

Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250

The NVTV card also exhibited a noticeable amount of ghosting around the Headline news bar at the bottom of the screen, an effect that wasn't present on any of the other tuners.

Note the ghosting above the topmost yellow line

Our final complaint with the NVTV card was related to its displaying of text - there was a lot of noise in any text that appeared on the screen.  The text problem was actually one that's common to most of the TV tuners in this roundup, but the combination of that, the ghosting and the grainy picture assured NVIDIA's NVTV a last place showing in this roundup.

Note the artifacts over the letters "NCAA"

At $130 - $140 for a dual tuner card, the NVTV is fairly affordable, but considering the issues that we've had with it, we would not recommend it.