HDTV Tuner cards

[bolive]

I have a Celeron D 3.33 with 1 gig ram and a 256meg atl x1300 video card.

I was hoping to add one or two HD OTA tuner cards to the system. What cards would work best? I have a HDTV Wonder and it seems to work OK. the only problem so far is its slow to start playback. I hear the audio for 5 to 10 seconds before the video kicks in. I can rewind and then it acts normal. Do they make HD card that have hardware encoders like the PVR-250?

Thanks
Brian

[naln]

Originally Posted by bolive

I have a Celeron D 3.33 with 1 gig ram and a 256meg atl x1300 video card.

I was hoping to add one or two HD OTA tuner cards to the system. What cards would work best? I have a HDTV Wonder and it seems to work OK. the only problem so far is its slow to start playback. I hear the audio for 5 to 10 seconds before the video kicks in. I can rewind and then it acts normal. Do they make HD card that have hardware encoders like the PVR-250?

Thanks
Brian

I use the Aver180 HD card for OTA-HD, works great!

You could also try the newer Hauppauge H-1600 as well- thinking of getting it myself. But you should also read up QAM stuff if that is something that your cable company provides/you would like to do. I have no experience with it.
The HD Home run is another recent popular device...but maybe I should let the people who have used these devices comment on that! Hope this gets you started in your research...good luck!

[mattdcknsn]

Originally Posted by bolive

I was hoping to add one or two HD OTA tuner cards to the system. What cards would work best? I have a HDTV Wonder and it seems to work OK. the only problem so far is its slow to start playback. I hear the audio for 5 to 10 seconds before the video kicks in. I can rewind and then it acts normal. Do they make HD card that have hardware encoders like the PVR-250?

I use USB tuners for OTA HD, I have a pinnacle and Hauppage. I think the pinnacle works better, it seems to be able to lock onto more signals than the Hauppage. I have a Avermedia A180, but was having difficulty locking onto signals. The only major differences between HD OTA tuner cards are how good they tune into the channels. All OTA HD is encoded as Mpeg2 format from the towers so the tuners only lock onto the signals. So no encoding is necessary by the tuner card, they pass the mpeg2 stream directly to the HD.

[bolive]

Thanks that was a great help.

Brian

[toricred]

I know that the A180 doesn't bring in AC3. Do any of the others?

[naln]

Originally Posted by toricred

I know that the A180 doesn't bring in AC3. Do any of the others?

Shouldn't that be fixable within Sage with the AC3 filters download? I have A180 with the AC3 filter as the mpeg audio decoder and I'm quite happy with the results....

[mattdcknsn]

Originally Posted by toricred

I know that the A180 doesn't bring in AC3. Do any of the others?

All of the HD tuners I have are able to capture AC3 audio. Like naln said, the A180 does capture AC3. I didnt have to do anything special on the configuration for these.

Are you able to get surround sound working on DVDs? It could just be a config problem.

[toricred]

I wrote Avermedia last year when I first got my A180. They told me in no uncertain terms that it doesn't capture AC3. AC3 Filter will upconvert it to AC3 and can upconvert just about anything to that as well.