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Thread: TV tuner cards for XP Pro.

  1. #1
    Member own's Avatar
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    TV tuner cards for XP Pro.

    Do I have a media center PC to take advantage of a tv tuner card? I just have Windows XP Pro on a regular system. Basically all I want to do is capture some football games or video game sessions onto my PC so I can edit them later.

    Would something like this - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814160026 - work for what I want it to do?

  2. #2
    Stark Raving MOD Midknyte's Avatar
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    newegg is blocked for me at work, but you don't need media center edition to use video capture. The new ATI 550 chipset is supposed to be pretty good.

    http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...eater_550_pro/

  3. #3
    Ultimate Member mobo57's Avatar
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    Windoz Media Center is not needed. But, I would look for another card. You should get something with hardware decoding rather than software to assure decent performance. I have the DC-10 and PCTV Pro, both use software, and the Diamondmax Xtreme 550 PCI and a Adaptec Videoh PCI, both use hardware decoding. Without a doubt, both of the latter produce a superior picture and capture over the first two. The extra 20 or 30 $ is well worth the investment.
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  4. #4
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    There is no "software decoding" in analog TV. _All_ the cards on the market convert the analog signal into a digital picture using a hardware solution.

    Some of the recent cards can _encode_ that result back into MPEG2 by use of an extra encoder chip. This is what other cards have to do in software - but that's only for DVD mastering, not for viewing nor necessarily for recording.

  5. #5
    Ultimate Member mobo57's Avatar
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    There is no "software decoding" in analog TV. _All_ the cards on the market convert the analog signal into a digital picture using a hardware solution.
    The most work for a system when capturing a feed is to convert the feed to a usable format, whether AVI, MPEG2++, etc. Having a hardware solution to convert to a standard MPEG2 format on the fly eliminates much of work on the system, much like why a P4 2.8 is significantly faster at working with video over the AMD 3200 XP. And MPEG2 is pretty much the standard type file system for video, along the lines of the .txt file format for document processing.

    Example:
    Using the Pinnacle PCTV Pro on my AMD 3200 with 1 gig memory etc, when capturing a tv program my CPU is running any where between 40 to 70 % capacity. This is because the program by default is converting to MPEG2 thru the software.
    Now on the same system using the Extreme PVR, my CPU is at 3 to 7 % utilization. This is because of the hardware d/encoding.

    Hardware advantages? Less chance of lost frames, better audio and MUCH less noise in the picture.

    I have had all 4 tuners installed in the same system. Without any question the hardware based systems beat the software based systems in quality by any and every measure, and to the point where I will never touch another software based system again.
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  6. #6
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    I said that when you're recording, it's useful. When you're _watching_, you are running the _uncompressed_ stream into the graphics card - and that is something _all_ PCI TV cards do purely in hardware.

    Even when recording, results are much better if you capture uncompressed and use an advanced encoder software later. That puts quite some demand on storage size and speed, but it is feasible with today's PCs.

  7. #7
    Ultimate Member AllGamer's Avatar
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    I've always used the ATI all in wonder series
    or if not their ATI TV Tuner Pro series
    i7-3970X, Corsair H80, 32GB G.SKILL, ASUS RAMPAGE4 Formula, VG278H(3x27")+3D Vision2, EVGA GTX 690(x2), OCZ ZX1250W, 256GB Vertex4(x2), Seagate 3TB(x5), Antec LanBoyAir, Logitech G510, G600, Z560THX, T.Flight Hotas, PZ35, Sennheiser PC163D, TrackIR5

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