tv tuner reccomendations + mythtv

quink · n00b Joined: 26 Oct 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Calif

Just got my system up and running with mythtv and its great and all, but it really shows how bad the quality of my tvtuner is. I was wondering a few things.
1. What is a good tv tuner to get, with quality being the important issue
2. What tv tuners support internal audio connections, including btaudio or some other means of getting the sound instead of a loopback cable
3. i'd like the optin of a loopback cable in case things just won't work

Basically i wnat a nice highquality card, with simple installation, that will run on a dedicated, fast computer htat will do only mythtv(plus webserve for my house), and that will not need an audio loopback cable

tphamm · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 5:01 am Post subject:

What kind of quality issues are you having? Bad/blocky picture? Sound quality? Is your playback on your monitor, or through tv-out?

I went the el-cheapo route with the WinTV-GO (bttv driver), and everything looks fine. I use MPEG-4 software encoding @ 5000 Kbps, high-quality and 4MV encoding enabled. The picture quality is comparable to what I see on TV (I should mention, this is on a 2.53 GHz P-IV. Those software encoding settings require some considerable processing power -- 70-80% CPU load). The card does require a loopback audio cable (included in the box) to the Line-in of your soundcard.

One of the guys I work with setup MythTV using the WinPVR-250. If you're low on CPU cycles, this (or the newer 350 model) may be the card to get, as it performs video encoding on its embedded processor. You need the ivtv driver for this card. Sorry, I don't know whether the WinPVR needs a loopback cable or not.
_________________
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CheshireCat · Guru Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 572

There are quality issues with some cards. I had a no-name bt8x8 card before my current one, and there was terrible static in my recordings that I didn't get on any other TV. That's mostly gone since I replaced it with a Hauppauge card :-)

quink · n00b Joined: 26 Oct 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Calif

Its mainly static issues, and only ont he channels i want
Plus my audio, currently, is mono.
I don't really need the PVR250 as my computer has pleanty of spare power, was just hoping there was something as good but wihtout the cost

CheshireCat · Guru Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 572

Mine's a model 401 (I think). I recall it being a 402 when I purchased it, but I don't see such a model now - I could be mistaken, or it could be a change in their offerings. Hauppauge changes the names occasionally, this is currently a "WinTV-radio". It's the lowest model with stereo sound, and I've been using the bt87x driver that's in newer versions of ALSA for audio capture. It cost about $80, but if you're feeling adventurous, they go for less on ebay.

What kind of static do you see? If it's in vertical bars, and primarily luma (ie, it's a variation in brightness, not hue), and gets worse on higher channels, then it's the same thing I have. It's still there, to a lesser degree, with my new card. I can just barely make out the faintest traces of it on a TV hooked up to my cable, so I think it's something in my cable that the tuner card is more sensitive to. Swapping connections between the TV and tuner card didn't fix it, either, so the splitter isn't likely to be at fault. Fortunately, the only channel I regularly record where it causes a real problem is cartoon network - I use a heavy denoise3d filter to clean up most of it. The other stuff is on broadcast channels, around 20 and under on my cable plan, and they're crystal clear.

quink · n00b Joined: 26 Oct 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Calif

Yeah i see vertical bars of static. The channels for me are upper chans(68-75)
and lower channels 1-11. It doesn't affect cartoon network/spiketv/history channels so its not life or death, but its annoying, and mono sucks.
From what i gather reading on the newer encoding cards, the newer connextant video decoder chips are 10bit and have a built in comb filter for much nicer results

CheshireCat · Guru Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 572

Newer as in bt878, or as in the cx88 (successor to bt8xx series)? I suspect the tuner to be at least partly to blame, as there was an obvious improvemnt between the no-name and Hauppauge card, and both were bt8xx chips.

For me, it doesn't happen on lower channels (ABC is on 9, here, and Alias is beautiful). Even Comedy Central (52) is pretty good, but CN (67 here) is pretty badly screwed, and is painful to watch without a strong denoise filter. I can't imagine that a comb filter would fix this at all - AFAIK these are for removing deinterlacing artefacts, not noise reduction, and mythtv already includes a very nice deinterlacer (try kerneldeint).

I wish tuner cards were a more commonly-used item - if I'd been able to find reviews, I might have hunted for a cx88 card, or and sa7134. Not that I know they'd be any better.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, the s-video input is perfect, too - another reason I suspect the tuner, and not the digitizer.

pi314 · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 9:40 am Post subject:

IMHO Hauppauge builds some of the best cards out there

I'm using a WinTV-Nexus-s for DVB video whenever I can. If you have an option to use this card I think it's the best choice you have - o yes, it's not the cheapest one, but after burning the 1st captured video on CD you know you have a realy good card

... if there's no choice and you want to use an analog card, I think you should have a closer look at the Win-TV Go2 (I should mention I have some quality problems with it, but they're because of some poor Cable-TV quality)
Or if you want to spend some more money for analog tv maybe some WinTV-PVR is what you want

PS: hardware-encoding is realy cool - I can play Battlefield while recording some film with the Nexus-s (under WinXP; linux not testet yet)

CheshireCat · Guru Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 572

Sadly, digital broadcast TV isn't as widespread in the US, so analog is all I've got. I believe when I got mine, it was labeled as a WinTV-DBX... In any case, there are quality problems with the card that I can't reproduce on a TV, although I do think the tuner is more to blame than the digitizer.

I'm not sure hardware encoding is a great idea, in my case - I rely on pre-compression filtering to keep the quality/bitrate ratio in my video to something that I can bear to watch without filling up my disk. Besides, I sort of planned the system to be a software encoder - it has enough muscle to do just about anything except BF1492 while encoding ;-)

gcasillo · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 10:09 am Post subject:

I cannot recommend the PVR-350 enough. Yes, the 350. This card has so many capabilities. It is simply the most card for the money. It has made a MythTV snob out of me. I put together a HTPC with an Antec Overture case, diskless, and my PVR-350. This is the frontend running over NFS. The backend is my file server with storage aplenty (420GB total). Very quiet case, and with the 350, it uses little of the CPU, so I can use that for other things like compiles, gaming, etc. The 350 has FM radio in addition to MPEG encode/decode and a VBI interface (for closed captioning and the like). Very nice card.

pi314 · Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2004 10:45 am Post subject:

quink · n00b Joined: 26 Oct 2002 Posts: 37 Location: Calif

Stero is okay, but surround would be a nice plus
I am just gonna watch live tv/record shows watch them once and delete them