Hello, I am in the market for a pci (or external) Tv tuner card with recording capabilities. Any suggestions out there? I found a Avermedia pci 500 (or 550) at tigerdirect for a good price, but I cant get any ratings on it. My local Compusa store has several but the price is about 50% more. Any suggestion would be appreciated. Also, What should I look for and have concerns with. Thanks.
I know there are alot better ones for big bucks but I have used ATI PCI tuner cards as well as the all in wonder cards and they have worked great for me. they give you alot of options for compression and are simple to use. They also pause tv.
Thanks jetster, Does this ati come with recording software, that will allow me to record either to hard drive or dvd? Thanks again.
Yes ATI cards come with software that alows you to record to your harddrive in AVI, MPEG, and ATIs own compression at verable bit rates from DVD quality to 1 frame every 3 seconds and everything in between for like a security cam allowing you to save up to 48 hours and only take up 1 gb. They will capture from multipal sorces including S video, RCA, 1394, or the TV turner. These connections will allow you to capture from a DVD player, VCR, Cam corder, web cam, cable tv and so on. The "all in wonder cards" will also convert analog to digital and back so you can take a .avi and record it on a VCR and so on. Its really alot for the money. You can also schedule recording times for shows you dont want to miss. The bundled software also includes video editing software to produce you own movies with transistions and menus.The down side is it has alot of drivers and very system demanding. So I would recomend at least Athlon 1.2 or above and at least 512mb ram if your running XP.
If you go for a dedicated tv tuner card dont look at ANYTHING unless it has built in hardware Mpeg 2 encoding. Otherwise it will become a HUGE resource hog on your system. This will make it useless to do anything else with while it is recording or playing TV.
