I want to hook my PC up to my TV and make it a Multimedia center for changeing stations and recording TV stuff like a VCR. I want the best qaulity there is for this and I will probably go up to about $150.00 in price. So far I am considering the:

ATI TV Wonder Elite(it has the Theater 550 Pro chip in it)
A Pinaccle studio card(don't know much about them yet)
or a Nvidia NVTV card(I dought this one though because I haven't gotten perfect reviews on it)


Any suggestions of which one would be best or where to get info?

Thanks,
-Darin

You won't get best quality with 150 bucks, but I would recommend Pinnacle stuff. I have a Studio PCTV here, and works fairly well.

Arent regular satellite/cable programs usually only brodcast in average quality (unless you are thinking of capturing Hi-def programmig)? Will capture cards matter very much in this scenario?

Yeah, I am leaning more toward Pinnacle because they stick strictly to video and not gameing. But ATI released this new chip called the Theater 550 pro that is supposed to be a real big deal. I wish I could read some reviews on how it compares to more professional brands like Pinnacle. Anyone hear about it yet or have tried it?

-Darin

Pinnacle & Hauppauge tend to be very good, and work with anything.

The trouble you may run into with ATI is that they don't want you to use other software, which can turn into an annoying nightmare (one of the many reasons why it is recommended to spend extra on a tuner instead of a AIW, FI). If this is different than their past ones, and can then work with just about any software, then the TV Wonder might be a good buy. I wouldn't trust my money with it until I saw some TV Time screenshots in a review, though.

Well, I don't want to hijack darin's topic, but I'm searching for a good USB2 TV tuner/PVR device, and I had actually narrowed it down to one from Pinnacle (PCTV Deluxe) and one from Hauppauge (WinTV-PVR-USB2).

I haven't really compared the specs yet, but do you know of any advantages or disadvantages one of those devices has over the other?

When I was looking at building a multimedia PC it seemed that the Hauppage WINTV-PVR-250 was the card that everybody recommended - for compatibility, quality, etc.

It's on the Hauppauge site for $149, so I guess you could get it cheaper.

that looks really cool, especially the hardware mpeg2 encoding (matrox etv 450 anyone? )

- Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 (PCI) can capture up to 720x576px at 25fps and take still pictures at 1600x1200px. Supports MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 hardware encoding and the quality is very good.
- Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe (USB2) has also very good quality and MPEG-1/MPEG-2 hardware encoding, some users reported stability issues though.
- Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (USB2) has the same capture resolution and hardware encoding of WinTV-PVR-250WinTV.

Here you can find detailed informations about several products from Hauppauge, ATI, Plextor, Pinnacle, A D S and Avermedia.

Wait....before you decide on that WinTV check out this thread....

http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.p...=254340&start=0

This is where someone took video pics and compared the WinTV to the new Theatrix Theater 550 PRO by Sapphire(has the new Theater 550 PRO chip by ATI). The Theatrix Theater looks alot better in color(but slightly not as sharp) when compareing the two in AVI format and is half the price. I wish there was a compareison between the Pinnacle and the Theatrix.


Let me know what you all think of it...

Thanks,
-Darin

Im a bit confused about this:
Surely this is quite relevant? If the (ATI) 550 took 9.8MB and the (Hauppauge) 500 took 4.5MB comparing stills is not really that fair. Both cards should have been using a similar bitrate for a proper comparison.

I would still have a few concerns with compatibility with the ATI card(s). Do you know what PVR software you will be using?

That said, it does seem the 550 is good value for money, at almost half the price.

Wow....I missed that part. Very interesting....maybe I'll sign up for a membership on there and ask that person. If that's true than that is not real comparison. I'm not really into video capture tech. so it's kind of hard for me to understand alot of what thier talking about.

You are right about compatiabilty...I want to use Media Center Edition(I think that is what it is called) and I have read about compatibility issues with the new chip(but I recalled reading about some issues with the Win TV and MCE also). But it just came out not to long ago so I'm sure in time that will be fixed.

I don't know what to get....all I want is video captured off of my cable tv signal at DVD quality, I'm not a HDTV fanatic or anything like that. At least, are these cards capable of that quality?


-Darin

All the cards mentioned in this topic can capture up to 720x576px, so to DVD resolution. I can say that Hauppauge deliver a very clear signal at this resolution.

theres differences between quality and resolution.

Hauppauge do a 250 specifically for MCE, with an FM tuner.

http://www.hauppauge.com/Pages/products/data_pvr250mce.html

I feel it necessary to point out at this juncture that I have never seen a 250 in action - I have simply stated that it seemed to me that all the PVR sites raved about it, played a little devil's advocate, and tried to answer some questions. I wouldn't want you to think that I knew what I was talking about. I am certainly no expert. Maybe it's a little outdated now... it was a few months back I looked. The ATI does sound good for the money (quality-wise).

All I can say is, if I built an MCE machine tomorrow, I would try to afford the WinTV-PVR-250MCE - as it seems tried and tested.

NB: I have worked on some products for MCE, and I really like the interface. I've never seen MythTV, etc. in action though.

I was leaning over to the Happauge and one of the systerm requirements is: VGA card (PCI or AGP) which supports video overlay (NVidia, S3, ATI, etc.). What exactly is video overlay? I'm not a gamer so I was just going to get an AGP $45.00 Aopen video card with Nvidia chip that has TV out. How do I know if it has video overlay and will it effect the quality of video capture?

Thanks,

-Darin

From: http://www.scala.com/definition/overlay.html

Also: http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/overlay.cfm

Of course: a very clear signal does not mean a DVD quality.

darin: ''dvd quality' is like 'cd quality' , doesnt mean a thing really. The true is that 4:3 pal interlaced wont look very good on dvd since it usually requires higher bitrate than that supported by dvd standards (but thats purely subjective), i would still go with a card that can do hardware mpeg2 encoding (which is hopefully dvd compliant). In any case do not expect brilliant quality analog capture card in that price range.