TV Tuner Card Help

sgs · TweakNOOB Joined: 07 Jun 2004 Posts: 19

Tv-tuner newbie, needs help, insights, web references... Have two cable boxes that perform tuning, each hooked to vcr's. Want to replace both vcr's with my existing pc. Am happy with my ATI Radeon 9200 SE (agp, 128 mb) under Win XP pro (1 gb memory). Want to be able to send cable signal from both boxes to same PC, each (simultaneously) recording to hard disk. Have C, D drives (internal) and F drive external, so I can route simultaneous recordings to different hard disks, if needed. Also want to be able to record from 1 cable box as I'm playing signal from other box. Also want to record long event (e.g. sports) and start playing recording from beginning while event recording still in progress.

Should I get a tuner card or an ATI all-in-wonder card? For tuner card, is powerful/moderately priced software available? Should I get 1 tuner/video card or two? Do I need to upgrade my system memory to 2gb or 4gb? Where can I go for further research?

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mk000000 · TweakNOOB Joined: 29 Dec 2004 Posts: 78 Location: Philly

SGS,

Let me chime in here and be helpful today, as I rarely do answer posts, but this one is right down my alley.

First off, you'll need a tv tuner with a good MPEG-2 encoder on board and a PC with at least 1.5GHz. If you want to do HD signals, that's out of the question until VISTA and CableLabs approved TV tuners with CableCards. And you need to currently buy it all with a new PC, you know the DRM blues...

SD signal is easy, buy a ATI theatre 550 or 650 card is my recommendation. You want dual tuning, buy two.

You can not control all cable boxes, but some and mostly satelittle boxes can be controlled with an IR blaster. The blaster is a USB thing that shoots the controls you pick to the external cable box (the real tuner). You'll have to research that yourself, google it.

Otherwise, going straight from the coax to the tv tuner in the pc is the most ideal scenario, but you will have no premium channels and the tuner is not blessed to descramble the signals. Nor can you use VOD or EPG from the cable company.

I recommend that you look into GBPVR, a great freeware pvr solution with many add-ins supported by a big community.

Anything else, ask.
MK
_________________
AMD Opteron 175
ASUS A8N-SLI DELUXE
Corsair 2GB CMX1024-3200 CAS 2 LED
ASUS EN6600GT
ATI Theater 550 PRO
WD Raptor 74GB 10K RPM
3 x WD 320GB SATA150
Seagate 300GB 7200.8 SATA150
NEC DVDRW DL
Windows XP Professional x64
Dell 24" widescreen LCD

mk000000 · TweakNOOB Joined: 29 Dec 2004 Posts: 78 Location: Philly

I forgot the other parts...

2Gb is plenty of ram, 1Gb should be your min. You can record two streams to one HD, assuming its a newer-ish one.
_________________
AMD Opteron 175
ASUS A8N-SLI DELUXE
Corsair 2GB CMX1024-3200 CAS 2 LED
ASUS EN6600GT
ATI Theater 550 PRO
WD Raptor 74GB 10K RPM
3 x WD 320GB SATA150
Seagate 300GB 7200.8 SATA150
NEC DVDRW DL
Windows XP Professional x64
Dell 24" widescreen LCD