Need Tuner/video card recommendation

[lordmeatball]

Hello everyone-

I'm setting up a sagetv machine for friend and I need a recommendation. He has a small profile IBM machine which does not have video out. The machine only has two PCI expansion slots. I need to pick out a tuner card and I also need a video-out solution. Ideally, I 'd like to find a PCI tuner card which also has some sort of video out to TV.

Any suggestions??

[jbarr]

If you are going to capture SD recordings, then Hauppauge's PCI cards are very popular. If you are tight for space, their PVR-500 is a dual-tuner model taking up only one PCI slot for 2 tuners. Your second slot could be for your video card. My understanding is tha most nVIDIA cards are excellent. Also, check to see if he happens to have an AGP slot. It might not be apparant at first.

Finally, don't overlook a USB solution for capture. Lots of people on this forum have had great success with Hauppauge's USB capture devices. Most work with USB 1.0 or USB 2.0, but 2.0 is preferred.

[paulbeers]

Any PCI cards that can capture video and do video out you are not going to want to use. Hauppauge 350 is the only one I am aware that has a hardware encoder for video capture and has video out. Unfortunately they are very buggy (some think due to overheating, others think it is just plain buggy). Any other pci cards that can capture and do video out would be software encoders (horrible for cpu usage). My original ATi All-in-wonder was in PCI form. The video out was great, but not being a hardware encoder, it would zap my CPU. I agree with jbarr. Get a dual tuner card and a seperate pci video card for output. He won't be able to do HDTV with PCI video cards (I don't think they have the throughoughput to handle HDTV being on the slow PCI bus), so anything even as basic as an ATI 9250 or Nvidia FX5200 should fit the bill. I think you can find even some Nvidia 6200's in PCI, but I could be wrong.

[mayamaniac]

If he has a regular TV and not an HDTV, I would strongly suggest getting an MVP Extender as the "Video-Out" solution. He'll get better picture quality than anything else coming out of the computer to the TV. Plus this will free up both PCI slots for TV tuners. If he can't fit a PVR-500, then he can get two PVR-150s.