Recommended PC HDTV tuner cards

[metropole]

What are recommend HDTV tuner cards that work well with Sage?

[teknubic]

The system requirements is a good place to start. Any of those "work well" with Sage. Several people here have the Avermedia A180 cards in use.

[metropole]

Interesting.
Currently, I have an Hauppauge 350 for the analog cable. In my setup I use the SVideo out to go through the receiver to the projector.
I wonder if I could find a HD card and use its "TV out" (I guess composite or something) as the output for HD and analog cable and end up with a dual tuner setup?

[jptaz]

I disagree with the statement "Work well".

I purchased the "VBox USB-A 3560 device" listed on the page and the only way I was able to add it to my system was by backing up all the settings and uninstalling and then installing fresh configuring it. Then I had to manually add the settings to my old settigs file before it was usable. The tuner is great, but SageTVs ability to seamlessly add an this HD tuner to an existing install is questionable at best.

John

P.S. Don't get me wrong I love SageTV, but they do not have the best setup and configuration reliability, nor do they seem to be able write to a standard API as well as say SnapStream.

[RandyJohnson]

I have been using the CatEye 150 and 151 turner cards. I have 3 of the 150 and 2 of the 151 cards currently in operation.

To date they have performed better than other cards that I have tried.

I am very happy with their performance.

I have tried the Fusion Gold 5 card and the AverMedia 180 cards.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by metropole

I wonder if I could find a HD card and use its "TV out"

Not one that will work with Sage, the MyHD is really the only one left, and it won't work with anything but it's own software.

And if you don't use Component, VGA or DVI, there's really no point going HD.

One more thing, there's really no benefit to a dedicated "TV out" once you get out of NTSC/PAL land

[dadams]

Originally Posted by stanger89

And if you don't use Component, VGA or DVI, there's really no point going HD.

I agree up to a point. I currently use a Catseye 150 which works very well and while the recordings don't look near as good on my SDTV as they do on my HDTV they still look SO much better than my standard cable analog recordings.

[metropole]

stanger89,

You are probably right about the TV out...
I was thinking more about the feature that Sage could output the analog TV from the 350 Hauppauge over the new board to its output. Since I use powerstrip for the "DVD" DVI out (video card) I'm not sure If I could use the same. I was thinking an other digital out might be an advantage?

[metropole]

All the cards listed in the system requirements are for over the air. Does this mean I couldn't useit on my cable (Comcast) for the basic local channels?

[dadams]

Originally Posted by metropole

All the cards listed in the system requirements are for over the air. Does this mean I couldn't useit on my cable (Comcast) for the basic local channels?

I believe that is correct, however, there are some cards that will have both a OTA tuner and an analong tuner that can be used for both.

[utica]

Originally Posted by dadams

I agree up to a point. I currently use a Catseye 150 which works very well and while the recordings don't look near as good on my SDTV as they do on my HDTV they still look SO much better than my standard cable analog recordings.

Dadams,

Do the Catseye 150/151 boards use hardware or software MPEG2 encoders?

Thanks.

[paulbeers]

All HDTV cards are software encoders....Why? Because the OTA HDTV streams are already Mpeg Encoded. All the cards do is pull the MPeg stream from the air.

[dadams]

Thanks Paubeers,

Utica, are you concerned with how much processor you will need for an HD card? I have mine in a AMD64 3200+ and I haven't seen much(or any) of a performance hit.

[Commodore 64]

I'm pretty disgusted with my Fusion 5 Lite. With it installed, Sage TV is an unstable steaming pile of cow dung. So is Media Portal.

I've ordered a 2nd Vbox DTA-150 to replace it.

[utica]

Originally Posted by dadams

Thanks Paubeers,

Utica, are you concerned with how much processor you will need for an HD card? I have mine in a AMD64 3200+ and I haven't seen much(or any) of a performance hit.

Thanks all for the education.

Yes I'm concerned about the system load situation; with the PVR-350 it did the encoding and not my motherboard (ITX motherboard with a 1.0GHz processor). I've read that the file type saved is a .ts file, didn't know it was an MPEG2 file. I assumed that the tranport stream needed to be converted into an MPEG2 file.

Since the .ts file is already an MPEG2 file, I assume that the processor load for saving a HD program is minimal.

For playing the HD program, you are using your processor power and video card accelerator, correct? My motherboard has a hardware decoder (MPEG2 and an accelerator for MPEG4) built in (VIA CN400 and VT8237 chipset). It works fine for video from the PVR-350, so I assume the processor load for the HD content will be about twice the load.

Thanks.

[utica]

Originally Posted by Commodore 64

I'm pretty disgusted with my Fusion 5 Lite. With it installed, Sage TV is an unstable steaming pile of cow dung. So is Media Portal.

I've ordered a 2nd Vbox DTA-150 to replace it.

Commodore, do you know what the amp load requirement is for the DTA-150? I'm trying to use a DC-DC power supply with a AC-DC external brick.

Thanks.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by utica

For playing the HD program, you are using your processor power and video card accelerator, correct? My motherboard has a hardware decoder (MPEG2 and an accelerator for MPEG4) built in (VIA CN400 and VT8237 chipset). It works fine for video from the PVR-350, so I assume the processor load for the HD content will be about twice the load.

Thanks.

HD is a lot more demanding than SD, more than twice that's for sure. I seriously doubt an EPIA will be able to play HD. Bare minimum is probably about 1GHz P3/Athon (something higher on a P4) with hardware accelleration, over 2GHz without.

[jason531]

Just to clarify, a transport stream (.ts) is MPEG-2. The MPEG-2 files to which most people are accustomed are program streams (.mpg).

OTA HD cards take the transport stream from the broadcaster and simply write it directly to the hard drive. No encoding or conversion takes place, so this requires very little CPU. It is playback which is very demanding. You need a pretty powerful CPU and video card to play back HD content smoothly. Microsoft's requirements for digital TV on MCE will give you an idea.

BTW, I do a lot of editing and recompression, so I typically convert the .ts files to .mpg using VideoRedo Plus. There are free tools to do this conversion, but VideoRedo does the best job of preserving audio sync, IMHO. Most of the other editing/encoding software I use handles program streams much more gracefully than transport streams, so the ts->mpg conversion is always the first step in my process.

Regards,

Jason
----------------------------------------
720p is better than 1080i
The "i" stands for inferior.

[jptaz]

At least with the current beta of SageTV it is actually not just dumping the .ts, but is actually processing out just the specific program stream from the OTA Tuner...this does actually require some CPU time...more than just writing Raw Data. The result is that SageTV generates .mpg program stream files...thought not exactly perfectly compliant ones. BeyondTV just dumps the raw TS Stream to disk, but it requires more processing for playback. Even the TS option in SageTV is parsing out the individual program you want...for instance PBS has 2 channels in their RAW TS Stream..so SageTV only writes the one channel into a .TS stream as opposed to the whole raw stream...again not perfectly compliant.

John

[jason531]

Thanks, John, I did not know that about the latest beta. I will have to give it a try. I will likely continue to "wash" the files with VRD before I edit/convert them, though. It does a pretty good job of cleaning up compliance/sync issues.

BTW, I really don't want to seem like I work for VRD. I think their software is overpriced for a cuts-only editor but I just haven't found anything else that does what I need.