Options for Freeview Reception in the UK.

[danward79]

Hi,

I see someone is using a Hauppauge HVR 1300 card, I would like to convert my SageTV machine to receive Freeview. I currently have a PVR250 and a 350 in my machine.

Could anyone suggest other choices for internal cards, which have decent freeview reception and comment on the picture quality?

I would like again to have two tuners in my machine.

Cheers

Dan

[ben_gb]

Hi Dan,

I've had fairly good success using Freeview with the Hauppauge Nova-T card, and also the Terratec 2400 DT card (this one has dual tuners but uses a PCI-Express slot rather than the normal PCI one).

The quality is pretty good on most channels, except Five which has a low-ish signal level at my location (60%), and currently the recordings by Sage have quite a lot of glitches (on both makes of card). I still need to investigate this more to see if I can improve it by an amplifier or maybe finding an alternative frequency.

The downside is that currently (well, in Sage v4.1.6), the auto-channel scanning didn't work, so it needed quite a lot of manual fiddling to set up, but once done you shouldn't need to do it again (except to add any new channels).

The other thing I've noticed is that it takes the picture 15-30secs or so to settle down and get the audio properly in sync after a channel change (again on v4.1.6).

In terms of overall picture quality, I haven't yet done a proper comparison, but I would say that the Sage pictures are not much different from a Digifusion or Humax Freeview PVR. I should mention that I am using an Nvidia graphics card with the Nvidia Purevideo decoder, which does make a difference.

Ben