MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2005 6:26 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Without a doubt, our two favorites from this review are Hauppauge's WinTV PVR-250 and ATI's TV Wonder Elite, with the overall win going to ATI for the TV Wonder Elite. If you're buying a card for your MCE system today, the TV Wonder Elite is the one to choose. Or if you already have a MCE machine and you have the Hauppauge card, then you're also sitting pretty. After hours of watching the same loop of CNN Headline news on these cards, the first and second place winners do offer a significant improvement in image quality over the remaining contenders - to the point where it is actually noticeable in day-to-day viewing.
The problem really isn't which card offers the best image quality, but rather how much money are you willing to spend for that last 5% of image quality - and here's where the decision gets tough. In most areas, SD cable is extremely poor quality to begin with. For many people, spending over $100 on a TV tuner just isn't justified to get an improvement on top of an already poor cable signal.
More than anything, ATI faces a major issue with the pricing and the release timeframe of the TV Wonder Elite. At this point, there's no excitement in yet another hardware MPEG-2 encoder, especially not one that weighs in at the top of the single tuner price class. Although ATI has done an excellent job with the Theater 550 and the TV Wonder Elite, it may just be too late to make a difference.
If you are less willing to spend money on a TV tuner (which is quite understandable), ATI's eHome Wonder and eMuzed's Maui-II PCI PVR are both excellent, lower priced alternatives. The ATI eHome Wonder is actually about half the price of the TV Wonder Elite, which means that you can actually end up with a dual tuner MCE box for the same price as a single tuner MCE box with the TV Wonder Elite.
By the end of this year, Windows XP Media Center Edition is supposed to have CableCard support, which will enable complete HDTV support for MCE boxes above and beyond the disappointing limitation for only over the air broadcasts that's in MCE 2005. Hopefully, this roundup will be a farewell to SD as we eagerly await the first HDTV tuners with CableCard support later this year.
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shplad - Sunday, May 1, 2005 - link
Hey legalbob2:So my theory was right. We all have a bit of "closet geek" in us somewhere, it just takes the right stimuli to bring it out. Didn't know you were perusing these boards these days. What video equipment are you using?
Watch out for that nasty broadcast flag. Unless Blockhead's brother can help you figure out a way around it. Me, I'm buying my TV tuner cards (to go into my MythTV machine) now before there are any legal issues.
You should watch out where you post, you never know what kind of crazies your post might attract ;-)
Madman
wuhoo - Monday, April 18, 2005 - link
any laptop tv tuner card reviews? with winodws media center, one could have a mobile dvr w/ laptopsgotsmack - Friday, April 15, 2005 - link
maybe add in Pinnacle cards for the next review?goinginstyle - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
When is the next review?Sidescraper - Thursday, April 14, 2005 - link
The Haupauge card pictured is nothing like the card I have. Haupauge MCE cards have an FM tuner. The non-MCE cards have an IR remote. The 350 has a MPEG decoder in hardware. See here:http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=pvr_card_id_guide
Kishkumen - Thursday, April 14, 2005 - link
#55 - That's correct. If the channels you care about require a cable box and cannot be seen using just your regular TV, then these analog tuners won't do you much good. I have heard of people being able to connect a serial cable to their cable box and use scripts to get their PVR software to change the channel on their cable box or satellite receiver, but that gets complicated.cer1 - Thursday, April 14, 2005 - link
#49 and #53Thanks for the info. In my case I'd be looking for to build a PVR to go with my Comcast Digital Cable signal. If I need to use the cable box to set the channels, then, as I understand it, using one of these cards would not be so useful to me. That is, the purpose is defeated if I can not program the PVR to record specific channels at specific times.
In this review are the cards getting signal from a cable box or are they being used with an analog signal?
lapierrem - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Not sure where you got the 350 being equivalent to the 250. The 350 has a hardware MPEG-2 De-coder, which may be redundant on faster systems, but would be a difference on a lower end MCE system, and the 250/150 don't have it. It's the 150/250 that are pretty much equivalent. Good review though.Kishkumen - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#48 - I am by no means an expert, but here is what I know about video sources in relation to the cards reviewed here. The cards reviewed here are only analog cards. They cannot take take a digital signal due to the tuners used. They can be used with digital cable, but the term as traditionally used is kind of a misnomer. Typically your cable company will have a basic package that includes a range of unencrypted, analog channels. You will only be able to use the onboard tuners of the various capture cards with these unencrypted, analog channels. After this, a cable company will often have what they term a "digital" package of a range of higher cost premium channels. The "digital" term tends to be kind of confusing. Typically these "digital" channels are taken from analog sources, digitally encrypted and then sent to a cable box which then decryptes the "digital" channel back into analog. The cards reviewed here will can then take that decrypted analog signal and convert it back into digital, but you will not be able to change channels with the capture card itself. You will have to use your cable box for that.After this, you have HDTV which is finally a true digital signal in the form of a transport stream. HDTV can be delivered either in high definition if the video is 720p or standard definition if the video is 480p or below. In reality, the transport stream is nothing more than a very high bitrate mpeg2 video. The capture cards reviewed here will not work with such a digital signal because they only have analog tuners.
In addition to over the air HDTV, cable companies are starting to come out with HDTV cable. They use an encryption scheme called QAM which differs from the transport stream signal delivered over the air. The QAM signal may or may not be encrypted depending on your cable company. If encrypted you will again be required to rent or purchase a cable box to decrypt the signal.
Anyway, I hope that clarifies things for you as far as source material goes for these cards.
Crucial - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I might have missed it but did the review state what mpeg2 decoder was being used? This makes a big difference in the quality and should have also been tested. I personaly find the PowerDVD decoder to be the best.Major disappointment to not see the PVR-150. I have 2 of them in my HTPC along with an HDTV Wonder. I switched to the pvr-150 from ehome wonders after Windows MCE kept losing the ehome wonders requiring a reboot.
Also why was there a mini review of the Winbook stuff thrown in? It was like a way to generate some ad revenue. I would have rather seen another page describing the difference between the mpeg decoders.
Overall this article stunk.