I have a Vista media center, and am planning to finally upgrade my television from Standard to HD soon. What tuner hardware will allow me to record not just OTA but cable (or dish) supplied HD content? I like the Hauppauge HVR-1600 because it will give me both in one card, but it appears that the HD content it will support is only OTA.
Get a card with a digital Tuner, Needs to support both ATSC and Clear-QAM (minimum)
Vista is going to support Cablecard as well (for scrambled Cable), so if that is important for you you may want to wait until those are available as well.
There is no card that supports satellite reception.
I'm looking for a basic tuner card that can receive all the channels that I get from my Time Warner set top box. Is it possible? Is there something that I should look for when buying one that allows that?
I'm not looking to replace the set top box, I'm just wondering if its possible to connect the set top box to a tuner card to get all my channels. If its possible.
I have an ATI 550 Theater TV Tuner Card, and am looking for the simplest, free, Tuner (and maybe capture) software to use. I had Beyond TV for a short spell, but the trial ran out.
Hm.. that is really difficult but here are some ideas. I am not sure if any of them works though.
- The card may have come with a tuning/capture software for the card. I don't know if it actually works but give it a shot if the CD included a program for that or ATI's website can let you download one.
- Windows Media Center. I am not sure if the particular card is compatible with it. Some tuner cards are and some others are not. But Media Center should work if your card is compatible with Media Center AND if the input to your card is either analog (cable or over the air) or an over the air digital antenna.
- Other free programs that seem to work with some tuners with some input signal types but may require extensive workarounds include:
GB-PVR (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Recording/GB-PVR.shtml) and TSReader.
Good luck!
Thinking about ditching cable and or DISH for a nice HD antenna for free TV. I however would still like to record shows, but have no DVR. I understand a PC tuner card could act like a DVR. What one would your recommend, and do you know of some free software that would allow me to set recording of certain shows at certain times?
Myth (for Linux) and GBPVR (for XP) seem to be the most popular free PVR software.
Opinions of tuner cards vary, see the link below for some reviews. Double check that the TV tuner card you choose is supported by the software you are going to use.
I have a analog tv tuner card for my PC but the channels come in fuzzy at best. I am using an amplified antenna and don't have cable(nor do I want it). I do have it on a desk with a desktop stereo system, cordless telephone, monitor, and printer. I also have another tv nearby using rabbit ears. Could something be interfering with the reception?
Tuner cards are not particularly sensitive-meaning they need a strong signal to function properly. My guess is that your signal is to low in power.
I have a TV tuner card installed on my computer(Desktop). Is there any advantage if I install a Digital TV tuner?
A TV Tuner has the normal analogue channels which you get on TV and a Digital TV Tuner has Digital Channel's which you get on satellite.
I installed a GeForce 8600gt graphics card on my media center pc and when i went to watch live tv it will not recognize my tv tuner card anymore. The tv tuner card came installed with the comuter and have not had any problems until now. It wont recognize the tv tuner card at all and i cannot find any solutions... thank you in advance...
call tech support
I have a fast computer. I have a tv tuner card in a pci slot. I have cable tv. I can use speakers and earphones to listen to it. I want to know how to use usb earphones to listen so I get better sound. All media player movies and music and games have awesome sound using the usb. Please help me get this combo to work.
There is an external wire for sound from the tv card to the sound card. I use it. It works with speakers and headphones. There is an internal cable as well like the cd audio from a cd drive to the sound card. I can use one or the other, either internal or external. Not both. I tried internal, and it still didn't do it. When I go to the tv, and run the setup, initialize wizard, there is settings for ac97 (built in sound) ports, soundblaster ports, but no usb. Please continue to help. Thanks.
Your TV Tuner Card should have a Sound Out
Plug that into the Sound In of your sound card
that will send the signal back to your computer
plug in your USB Headphones
I was planning to buy a internal tv tuner card to view my DTH connection but the vendor advised me to buy a costlier extarnal tuner card that could directly work with my monitor saying that internal tv tuner cards cause windows to crash frequently and would ultimately leave my windows unusable. I want to know is this true ?
I've been using an Hauppauge internal TV tuner for 3 years & it has never caused me any grief whatsoever.
I've used it on XP Media Center & now for over a year on Vista .... no problems at all.....never even needed to install a driver, Windows detected the card instantly.
Like the other guy said, "Never go back to that store" .... the guy just wants you to buy what he needs to sell, & has no idea what he is talking about. He tried to take you for a fool.
best tv capture cards on the market:
http://hauppauge.com/site/products/prods_hvr_internal.html
regards,
Philip T
I have vista and was thinking to turn my Desktop into all in one, but the terms of tuner card or Media extender confuses me. so wats the difference? does one need to be bought to work with other? are the connected or sumthing. and response will be helpful. thnx
The Vaio L117FX/B starts at $1300; we tested a high-end, $2000 (as of December 8, 2009) configuration. At that price, you could score a standard tower desktop that has greater performance and upgradability, but such is the nature of all-in-one PCs.
This Vaio ratchets up the Intel processor to one step past that of the 2.33GHz quad-core chip found in the Gateway One ZX6810-01 --a $1400 23-incher that also has a multitouch screen and a TV tuner (but no Blu-ray). However, despite its combination of a 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q8400S processor, 6GB of DDR2-800 memory, and a 1TB hard drive, this Sony AIO in some ways doesn't surpass the Gateway in performance.
Both systems earned a WorldBench 6 score of 105, the best general performance by an all-in-one without an Apple logo. For comparison--as tested using 64-bit Windows 7 and Boot Camp--the $2200 Apple iMac (27-inch/Core i7) scored 128 in WorldBench 6, while the $2000 iMac (27-inch/Core i5) notched 123.
The Vaio also delivers strong gaming performance for an all-in-one, but falls behind the Gateway and the iMacs. Still, its 69 and 41 frames per second in our Unreal Tournament 3 tests (at 1024-by-768 and 1680-by-1050 resolution, respectively; high quality) make it better suited for gaming than most all-in-one-desktops.
The Vaio's picture quality is as lush in its saturation as it is strong in its contrasts within a scene. That's partly thanks to the screen's glossy finish, which does much to amplify the perceived richness of the images--almost too much. It's very easy to catch a reflection of yourself in this display, let alone any nearby light source. Meanwhile, the built-in speakers definitely sound better than your average laptop. It won't shock and awe you, but it's a sweeter sound than what most competing all-in-one desktops can offer.
External port connections are extensive. The side of the screen has two USB and a FireWire 400 port, plus separate slots for a Memory Stick and a standard SD card. Three more USB ports are on the back, along with one optical audio output, a gigabit ethernet port, an RF connector, an HDMI input, and a composite video input. Sony clearly wants this system to become an essential part of your living room setup, which is possible to do in a wireless fashion thanks to the Vaio's integrated wireless-N connectivity. An included Blu-ray reader/writer rounds out the system's high-definition multimedia capabilities. Except for a faster connection standard like eSATA, it's difficult to think of other pertinent connections that the Vaio could offer. On the other hand, you may wish for more upgradability: You could upgrade the hard disk in the previous Vaio all-in-one, but this time around you're limited to notebook-style RAM upgrades.
The bundled keyboard and mouse are mostly generic, but are styled to match the Vaio's dark color and straight edges. They're both wireless, and the keyboard has extra buttons to access PC functions such as volume controls, sleep mode, and zooming. The keyboard can also tuck away in the gap provided beneath the display.
Sony's Vaio VPCL117FX/B matches the cheaper Gateway One ZX6810-01 in general performance, and both have a TV tuner. The Vaio is larger (a 24- versus a 23-inch multitouch screen) and includes a Blu-ray reader/writer. But the Gateway comes out ahead in gaming performance, and it costs $600 less. If money is not an issue, however, then by all means feel free to splurge.
--David Murphy
If you’ve heard of Linux, you’ve probably also heard the following comment (or something like it):
Linux won’t be ready for mainstream use until it “just works.”
Or maybe:
I wanted to like Linux, but after installing it my (insert hardware) and (insert hardware) and (insert hardware) didn’t work.
Some are even so elegant as to say it like this:
LINUX SUX IT DONT WORK ON MY AWSOME COMPUTER. WINDOWS RULZ!
All these arguments boil down to the same flawed perception: that getting hardware to work in a Linux environment is unreasonably difficult.
I would like to provide two examples - one, an analogy; the other, a personal experience - that explain why this assessment is both unfair and unreasonable.
The Analogy
Imagine, for a moment, that you have a car that’s several years old. You like this car - the body’s in decent shape, the color is nice, it runs well - but you’re simply not getting the performance out of it that you’d like. Rather than buy a whole new car, you make the reasonable decision to simply upgrade the engine.
So you do some shopping around, and eventually you stumble upon a website where someone is giving away brand new engines for FREE. The engine claims to be powerful (the article states that this type of engine is used on 80% of the world’s sports cars), reasonably easy to install and use, and you’re free to modify the engine however you would like. In return, the website simply asks you to donate some money to their cause if you can, and pass along word of what they’re offering.
It sounds too good to be true, but since they offer to send you an engine for free, you go for it.
While you wait for the engine to arrive, you go about stripping the current engine out of your car. You take careful notes on the location of every hose, belt, and bolt, and by the time the new engine arrives, the car is ready for it.
With the help of a friend you drop the new engine into place and reattach all the critical parts. After checking and double-checking to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you start up the car…and to your amazement, it actually starts! After a couple final adjustments to get everything perfect, you close the hood and take your almost-new car for a ride.
*PAUSE*
I’ll admit - no analogy is perfect. But work with me for a moment as I explain myself.
As you have probably figured out, the car in our analogy represents a PC’s hardware, while the engine represents a PC’s operating system.
Like cars and engines, PC hardware and operating systems are theoretically interchangeable. It might take a hacksaw and a welding iron, but with some work, you could get most any internal combustion engine to run in almost any chassis. Similarly, it might take some time and hacking, but with some work, you could get most any OS to run on almost any PC hardware.
However, people mistakenly think that any OS should run on any hardware configuration without user intervention. This is as stupid as thinking that you could stick any engine in any car and - without any effort - have it magically work. Mixing and matching parts that weren’t designed for each other is not a perfect science. It most likely takes some tweaking to ensure that everything works smoothly.
By and large, manufacturers assume the burden of ensuring that a stock engine works in its associated car. You don’t typically buy a new car, take it home, then realize that the manufacturer has forgotten to connect three or four hoses. (Unless it’s a Ford, of course…) Similarly, when you buy a PC, you can be reasonably sure that the PC vendor - Dell, HP, whoever - has done their job and made sure that the computer’s hardware and OS play together nicely.
Which leads me to my first major point.
If you buy a PC with Windows and it “just works,” who cares?
Obviously a new computer with a pre-installed OS is going to “just work.” If it doesn’t, it’s the fault of the PC vendor - not the hardware manufacturers or the OS. A new computer should always “just work.”
Many anti-Linux individuals totally miss this point. They wrongly assume that because they bought a PC with Windows on it and it “just worked,” Windows is a superior operating system. How stupid is that? It’s akin to saying “the stock tires that came with my car are superior because they just worked.” No kidding, genius. STOCK PARTS SHOULD ALWAYS “JUST WORK.”
Which leads into my next point.
In the example above, you did some homework before sticking a new engine into your car. You carefully removed the old engine, taking note of where each belt, hose, and bolt went. You probably made use of all of that information when installing the new engine.
Only an idiot would take the stock engine out of a car and drop in a new one and expect the car to “just work.” Obviously, some hoses are going to need to be re-attached, some belts are going to need to be hooked up, etc.
Why should a computer be any different? Thus, my second major point is:
It is not reasonable to drop a new OS onto a computer and expect it to “just work.”
I don’t care what you’ve heard about Windows or Linux - if you install a new operating system on a computer for which it was not SPECIFICALLY designed - and by specifically, I mean “specific down to every single piece of hardware” - there is a chance that you will need to do some manual tweaking. Sometimes you may get lucky and have it “just work.” But most of the time, regardless of OS, you will need to tie up a couple loose ends. Such is life.
Now I know what some of you are thinking - “yeah, but I installed (insert OS here) on my computer and it just worked.” If that’s the case, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. Very, very few people can install an OS onto randomly assembled hardware and have it work on the first try.
Are you starting to get a clearer picture of things? I hope so, because far too many people misunderstand this basic issue.
Now in order for this article to really get people pissed off, I now need to state a firm opinion on which operating system has the best hardware support. (But if you’re here, you probably already know what I’m going to say.)
Hands down, the operating system with best hardware support is Linux. In fact, no other OS comes anywhere close. Not by a mile.
As you may have noticed from the link in the analogy above, Linux runs on almost 80% of the world’s supercomputers. It also runs on an ever-growing number of servers. Desktop Linux users number somewhere in the 15+ millions. Some 90+% of the desktops and servers in Hollywood run on Linux. Linux runs cellphones, traffic signals, election machines, satellites, military equipment, medical equipment, particle accelerators, digital cameras, TVs, DVD players, mp3 players, and many government systems. If you’re interested in reading a huge list of specific uses for Linux, check out the bottom of this page.
Now impressive as this is, it really doesn’t apply to the everyday user. After all, I’m not building my own particle accelerator or traffic signal.
So the real question for most users is - how well will Linux work for ME?
And the answer is, of necessity, vague. No one can say for certain how well Linux will work for you. You’ll just have to try it.
One of the problems with attempting to predict how well an OS will work on a particular set of PC hardware is that there are more possible hardware combinations in a modern computer than there are atoms in the universe. (That isn’t an exaggeration, btw.) And that’s just for major hardware - processor, motherboard, RAM, hard drive, video card, sound card, monitor, keyboard, mouse. When you start factoring in optional hardware (like any of a million possible USB devices), the list of possible computer configurations quickly approaches numbers difficult to quantify.
So in reality, it is impossible to guarantee that a given OS will work on any system other than ones for which it has been specifically designed.
But I know, I know - this theoretical crap still doesn’t answer the core question of “will Linux work for me?”
For that, let me give you the best thing I’ve got - my own personal experience.
A Personal Experience
This Christmas I picked up a refurbished HP Pavilion Media Center PC. The specs are similar to this, including:
2.8ghz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ 2gb RAM (667mhz DDR2) 500gb SATA hard drive, plus another 200gb SATA drive manually installed by me NVidia GeForce 9400GT video card Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS sound card with recording hub (pulled from my old PC) LightScribe DVD Burner Memory card reader (one of those 9-in-1 or 10-in-1 things) TV Tuner Card (Hauppauge 1600) The usual set of ports (6xUSB, 2xFirewire)In addition, I’d be tying the PC into an existing monitor (22″ HP LCD), 5.1 surround speakers, Epson Stylus CX8400 printer/scanner/copier, an off-brand graphics tablet, and a webcam.
In all honesty, I consider this to be a pretty nasty adventure for any OS. That’s an eclectic mix of hardware ranging from almost brand-new parts (the video card came out August 2008) to relatively old parts (my sound card was purchased in 2002).
As for an OS, because the system was refurbished it came without a pre-installed OS. I made the choice to install Ubuntu 8.10 to the 500gb drive and Windows XP on the 200gb drive.
Here’s how it all went down.
Ubuntu 8.10:
By and large, Ubuntu 8.10 worked shockingly well. I had to manually configure only the following three pieces of hardware:
Hauppauge 1600 TV Tuner card (simple process using this set of excellent instructions) Epson printer/scanner/copier (my model is CX8400, to make it work you just have to select the CX7800 model - found that by a quick googling). Graphics tablet (using this guide)Windows XP:
Unfortunately, Windows XP was a different story. Upon install my ethernet refused to work - which obviously prevented me from using the internet to track down answers to my many hardware woes.
After some serious google-hunting on my laptop, I was finally able to track down an NVidia installer that got my ethernet working (apparently my ASUS motherboard used an NVidia chipset). With that done, I could set about finding and installing drivers for the following devices:
NVidia GeForce 9400GT (video card worked, but to change any of the settings and enable 3D acceleration I had to download and install specific drivers) TV Tuner Card (non-functional until I tracked down official Hauppauge drivers online; however, I don’t have any recording software, so the card is still technically useless). Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS (sound worked, but to get surround sound I had to find the CD that came with the card and install specific drivers) Epson Stylus printer (printing worked, but to access printer-specific settings I had to find the CD that came with the card and install specific drivers) Graphics tablet (non-functional and drivers not available for download; fortunately, I had a Windows driver CD that came with the tablet - had I not had that CD, it would have been ugly…) Webcam (non-functional until I used my webcam installer CD).After a lot of restarts (five, I think), I eventually got my XP install up and running.
My Final Point
My final point is this: with some determination, you can get both Windows and Linux to run on almost any hardware. If you have driver CDs for every piece hardware, Windows should be fairly easy to install. Linux is much more a function of googling, since very few hardware manufacturers include linux drivers on their included CDs.
In my case, installing Ubuntu 8.10 was a MUCH more pleasant experience than installing Windows XP. Part of this is because Linux is specifically designed to be installed on random hardware. Very few computers come pre-installed with Linux, and the guys writing Linux know this. If you use Linux, odds are that you installed it yourself. There is no manufacturer-based QA team that checks to ensure hardware compatibility.
Installing XP was ugly because XP is not really designed to be dumped onto untested computers. Microsoft goes to great lengths to ensure that hardware manufacturers comply with Windows hardware-compatibility requirements, as well as requiring PC vendors to ensure that pre-installed (or OEM) copies of Windows are properly configured. XP has very few drivers preconfigured, since they rely on hardware manufacturers to provide install CDs with their hardware. Since my refurbished machine came with no install CDs, tracking down the proper XP drivers was a nightmare.
In Conclusion
So there - now you’ve seen at least one example where installing Windows was a hell of a lot harder than installing Linux (in the form of Ubuntu 8.10). If you bought a computer with Windows pre-installed, chances are that it will work better “out of the box” than Linux will. Don’t be surprised, and don’t fault Linux for that. Besides - if you’re installing Linux solely for better hardware support, you may not know what you’re doing.
I for one think it’s well worth the effort to get Linux up and running, and not just because I’m an inane fanboy. I like the general ease of setting up new hardware. I love that a free program (called MythTV) allows me to use my new PC+tuner card as a DVR. I love how quickly Ubuntu 8.10 starts and shuts down. All of my most-used software (Firefox, OpenOffice, and GIMP) works on both Windows and Linux, but I find it much more responsive on Linux. I much prefer the free Amarok player to Windows Media Player (or the abomination called iTunes).
For me, Linux makes using my home computer a much more enjoyable and productive experience.
Will it do the same for you? I don’t know. I’m not psychic. Instead, head to www.ubuntu.com (or any other Linux distro’s homepage) and give Linux a try.
Just remember the analogy from the start of this article - like replacing the engine in a car, you may have to do a bit of work to get Linux working just the way you like it.
But once you have it working, you’ll realize it was absolutely worth the effort.
Instead, the 430-121B come stuffed with accessories like a dedicated graphics card, a TV tuner, and a blazing quad core processor. Dell XPS media machine traps competitors in headlock, taps thrice
While renovating the old Victorian home, these items were found in the wall. The wall panels were being removed to make way for cabinets.
