Any decent High Definition cards out there?

[gregmo]

We tried Access DTV (I think that's the name of the card) and it didn't have a guide. They told us that they lost their contract with Titan TV. It also had another issue, and they said to return it for a second one. I don't want to continue at all with the company because their 800 number is disconnected and it's almost impossible to contact them. That tells me they are probably on the road to bankruptcy. At any rate, I'm not interested in getting tied into a card from a company that I can't rely on for support.

So we switched to the MyHD card. The electronics on it weren't nearly as impressive as the stuff on the Access card (that card had a lot of impressive stuff), but it was supposed to come with a good reputation. Well, it fried everything when we put it in. It wouldn't work with the Radeon 9600 card. Even after reinstalling everything, it still had issues. Now we have to reinstall the OS and try to fix it with some suggestions by Digital Connection.

It's not worth it to me to bother with this card. The support forum is in Korea, not here. I don't know how to contact them. This all adds up to a situation where I'd rather find a card elsewhere.

Who else makes or is coming out with a HD card that works well and is supported? Surely these two aren't the only ones.

[JJarmoc]

I bought an AccessDTV based on the experimental sage support for it. I'm underwhelmed. Their support stopped corresponding with me in the middle of an issue, and I'm unable to get a hold of them on the 800 number. Ugh.

Aside from AccessDTV and HiPix the one other name that comes to mind is Dvico's FusionHDTV. They're also from Korea and I don't think there's much US support. HiPix is no longer in business, but the folks on AVSforum.com have their source code and are developing drivers and app software for it.

If you haven't already, see if someone on AVSforum can help with your MyHD issues. That seems to be the most popular card over there.

[madpoet]

*shrug* MyHD is by far the most stable of the HD tuner cards. It's far easier than the Fusion. Wish I knew if it would ever be supported under Sage...

-MP

[cpete]

There's also HiDTV. I have have one of these cards. It's good.

Chris

[RBTConsultants]

Accessdtv card has new software and support from avsforum members. Check it out. It has by far the best potential.

Bob

[riekl]

AccessDTV is the ONLY HD card that can "trick play" (pause, rw,fwd live tv) the other cards can only view and record it. Therefor .. AccessDTV is the only option for those of us looking for true PVR HDTV (which .. why would anyone want a VCR HDTV (MyHD, Fusion) when they can have tivo HDTV (sage+accessdtv)

[mikesm]

AccessDTV can't do 256 QAM which the cable guys transcode the OTA and other HD programming to. Which means it's limited to OTA broadcasts alone, and so it'll be obselete when dual 8VSB and 256 QAM cards come out next year.

Right now there is no good choice for a PC HDTV card, but this will likely change next year. Unless you have a pressing need, I would wait.

Also, I think if the Dvico fusion were integrated into Sage, you could do live tv pause and such - the bandwidth needed to do this isn't bad at all. MythTV supports this with the pcHDTV card under Linux today, so it's not so much an issue for the card as the software environment that it operates in.

Thanks,
Mike

[riekl]

Mike,

Well there is where we will have to agree to disagree I think the AccessDTV is a good card _now_

Will there be a better card sometime next year ? Probably .. and will there be a better card then that the year after that ? Probably ..

We don't discuss vaporware that isn't even close to market. On the market today the AccessDTV is the ONLY card that can pause live tv, the fusion can NOT pause live tv the hardware does not allow it.

[mikesm]

Riekl, I am always willing to be proven wrong. We can disagree about the AccessDTV card, none of the cards today do what you would want from a card that would recieve widespread consumer use. And it doesn't look like we're going to see follow-on hardware from the company, and support will depend on the users (not necessariy bad, but hardly a viable mass market proposition).

On the Fusion, please explain to me why the hardware prevents it from doing live tv pause, etc? The card is very simple - it demodulates the 8VSB signal coming from the onboard tuner and streams the 19 Mbps or so MPEG-2 across the PCI bus to the system. After that it's all a software issue.

If you had a software PVR that wrote the MPEG-2 to disk and played the stream from the disk, then when can't it pause, rewind, etc...? This is nothing different than what the Hauppauge PVR-250 card does, except it's doing onboard encoding instead of recieving the MPEG-2 already encoded from the broadcaster, and the bitrate is about 10X of what the non-HD stream generates.

Neither the Fusion or the PVR-250 outputs video to a monitor, that's done from the AGP video card.

Please let me know what I'm missing here...

Thanks,
Mike