Comparison Review of TV Tuner cards
This recent article at AnandTech compares several current PCI TV tuner cards, including
- ATI’s eHome Wonder
- ATI’s TV Wonder Elite
- AverMedia M150
- eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR
- Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250
- NVIDIA’s dual tuner NVTV
The Hauppauge PVR-250 and the ATI TV Wonder Elite are relatively expensive but have visibly better performance in the various tests on the cards. These are all standard video input, so the image quality is also limited by the signal feed from the cable company.
I’ve been quite pleased with the Hauppauge PVR-350 I’ve been working with recently, which incorporates the same tuner and video encoder as the PVR-250. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison with the more recent PVR-150 at some point. I selected the Hauppauge over some of the alternatives on the basis of both video quality and the availability of software, since some of the other tuner hardware is essentially Windows-only. In contrast the Hauppauge hardware has extensive support under Linux, in projects like MythTV, FreeVo, MediaPortal, etc.
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October 21st, 2007 at 4:27 pm
I’ve been googling my problem for a while, and ran across your site, so I’m hoping perhaps you could help me out a little?
My mom has an HP Media Center Edition m377n PC, and I decided to steal her TV tuner out of it. From what I can tell, it is the Emuzed Maui II card. I then took a look on the net, and after finding MythTV and deciding I liked it, I tried installing and trying to get it to work with this Tuner card. It doesn’t. MythTV is working great, but the card is not. How much do you know about MythTV, and could you possibly help me get this thing working? I’m dual booting XP Home, and Ubuntu 7.10 on the computer I built about 6 months ago (E6300, 1 GB RAM, 2 x 160 GB WD HDD’s, Emuzed Maui P.O.S.). I found a driver for the tuner on XP, but of course I haven’t found any free (free is important to a 16 year old oddly enough!) software on Windows.
Any help you can give me, I would GLADLY accept. Thanks!
My email is swimdude@pigasus.com, and I’m sure that would be much easier to communicate with that this blog.
David