HDTV Tuner Card Advice Needed

[hypergolic]

I own an ATI HDTV Wonder card. I wish I didn't. It uses more than 75% of my system resources, and the analog cable/air NTSC video quality is poor with lots of artifacts.

Can anyone recommend a good quality HDTV/analog tuner card with onboard memory and processing so my computer is not bogging down so bad???

Oh, and the HDTV video is pretty, but stutters like crazy.

I have a 2 GHz Pentium 4, with 256 MB of RDRAM, a 64 MB GeForce 3 Nvidia card. Yes its an older machine. What I want to do is simply too much for it and I want to avoid buying another machine for awhile.

I am running Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed. I am also running the latest version of Sage TV.

The bottom line is I need to take the load of the CPU, so the need for onboard processing for the tuner card is important.

Thanks

Philip Neidlinger

[ybrew]

You need a better processor than that to watch HD.

Sage recommends 3 ghz.

For recording, you're fine. For playback, you're too slow.

[clmolnar]

That video card also needs to be upgraded. I recommend at least a 7600GT for HD playback. You also want to look at upgrading your RAM, however for the price of RDRAM, you might basically be able to get a new motherboard, CPU, ram combo.

[blade]

You're looking at two separate issues. On the capture side you're currently using a card that only supports software encoding for analog. You need something that does hardware encoding. There are a few cards that do both HD and hardware encoding of analog. I believe the ATI 650 does and there is also a solution from AutumnWave. IMO they are too expensive for what you get.

These aren't exact prices so I could be way off, but I believe the 650 is around $130 and it can capture HD and do hardware encoding for analog. It can not capture both at the same time so look at it as 1 tuner.

You can pick up a PVR-150 for around $60 and a HD card without analog hardware encoding for $70. So for close to the same price you can have a total of 2 tuners. You might also use your current card for HD only and pair it with a PVR-150 instead of picking up another HD tuner. I don't have any experience with your card so I'm just assuming it does ok for HD capture.

Another thing to consider is whether or not your system is capable of playing back HD. 3ghz is the recommendation for software decoding. With a good video card the cpu requirement is much lower. I'm using an XP-2400M and cpu usage is only 24-60% depending on the content. Unfortunately your video card isn't going to be up to the task. If you want to playback HD on that system I think you'll have to upgrade it.

Would a HD extender be an option? If so you could always wait until Q2 and pick one up and use your current machine as a server. I have a couple of clients that aren't powerful enough for HD playback and instead of upgrading them I'll just replace them with an extender.