Tuner with Best Picture Quality

[flavius]

I'd like to replace my M150 with something better - why not with something really good?

What's the best card in terms of picture quality?

[flavius]

So, nobody has an opinion on this one? That can't be.

[mayamaniac]

If you want a single tuner, then the PVR-150 is pretty good in my opinion. If you want dual tuner, then look here:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=22610

[flavius]

The pvr-150 I was about to order - until it occurred to me that I hadn't done any kind of serious research in about three years or so.

Hauppauge has a pretty good track record. My first tuner, maybe eight years ago now, was some software encoder from Hauppauge. And while the pvr-250 is still looking pretty good, the M150 does not anymore - at least that's what a look at my 42" hd plasma is telling me..

Since I already have 4 tuners (2 for HD in a moto stb), I wasn't orginally looking at dual tuners. However, researching the current line-up from Hauppauge, I came across that very thread you're linking to, via google ..

I'll probably get the NVidia DualTV. Odd it is though, that this product doesn't seem to be wildly popular, despite it's qualities..

You can't even get it from Newegg, let alone amazon. What's up with that? It has been on the market for 10 month or so now?

Edit: you can order it at snapstream.com.

[PGPfan]

You can also get it at PCAlchemy .

-PGPfan

[flavius]

Which is good, but more expensive (+$10)

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by flavius

I'll probably get the NVidia DualTV. Odd it is though, that this product doesn't seem to be wildly popular, despite it's qualities..

A couple reasons the DualTV hasn't been as popular as the PVR-500. The released drivers for it didn't support multiple DualTV cards. There is now a beta driver out that will now support multiple cards. Another issue was that you couldn't do any tuner adjusts in Sage like you could in Windows MCE. It was also a driver issue, but I heard that Sage came up with a workaround.

With both of those issues fixed, it may be more popular in the future. I just wish I could do CC on the DualTV like I can do on the PVR-500. I would like to try one, but I value CC more than a little better picture quality.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by flavius

However, researching the current line-up from Hauppauge, I came across that very thread you're linking to, via google ..

I'm amazed that google crawlers cached that page already since its only about a day old. Makes me wonder how much computing powers they have doing the crawling, must be an insane number.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by ke6guj

Another issue was that you couldn't do any tuner adjusts in Sage like you could in Windows MCE. It was also a driver issue, but I heard that Sage came up with a workaround.

Where is the info on that? I have pair of Hauppauge PVR-250 cards and was thinking of moving to this NVidia card to save a slot. I run on XP.

Is the workaround a hack, or does it give me full functionality to the product? I assume within Sage I can set the contrast/brightness, etc?

Thanks,
Robert

[ke6guj]

Here is the first mention of the workaround, http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...ghlight=dualtv .

And in the 6.0.15 release notes, http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...ghlight=dualtv ,
"Fixed bug with NVidia DualTV card where the color calibration settings weren't taking effect"

[valnar]

Cool. Thanks!

[FidgetyRat]

I actually ran into a website when researching for myself that compared the hauppauge cards. I don't have the link anymore though..

One interesting thing I did not know was that the pvr 150's had better quality then the 250's.

[flavius]

Given what I'm already seeing from my pvr 250: excellent! I'll get my DualTV tomorrow which I have come to believe is superior to the pvr 150!

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by flavius

Given what I'm already seeing from my pvr 250: excellent! I'll get my DualTV tomorrow which I have come to believe is superior to the pvr 150!

I remember when the nvidia dualTV came out, Jeff said that even at lower bitrate, it can produce the same quality as the hauppauge at high bitrate. So this mean it must have a better encoder than hauppauge.

[flavius]

I was reading that very thread a short while ago: Jeff later somewhat put that statement in perspective. However, IIRC, for everybody who owns both the NVidia comes out on top.