MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2005 6:26 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Without a doubt, our two favorites from this review are Hauppauge's WinTV PVR-250 and ATI's TV Wonder Elite, with the overall win going to ATI for the TV Wonder Elite. If you're buying a card for your MCE system today, the TV Wonder Elite is the one to choose. Or if you already have a MCE machine and you have the Hauppauge card, then you're also sitting pretty. After hours of watching the same loop of CNN Headline news on these cards, the first and second place winners do offer a significant improvement in image quality over the remaining contenders - to the point where it is actually noticeable in day-to-day viewing.
The problem really isn't which card offers the best image quality, but rather how much money are you willing to spend for that last 5% of image quality - and here's where the decision gets tough. In most areas, SD cable is extremely poor quality to begin with. For many people, spending over $100 on a TV tuner just isn't justified to get an improvement on top of an already poor cable signal.
More than anything, ATI faces a major issue with the pricing and the release timeframe of the TV Wonder Elite. At this point, there's no excitement in yet another hardware MPEG-2 encoder, especially not one that weighs in at the top of the single tuner price class. Although ATI has done an excellent job with the Theater 550 and the TV Wonder Elite, it may just be too late to make a difference.
If you are less willing to spend money on a TV tuner (which is quite understandable), ATI's eHome Wonder and eMuzed's Maui-II PCI PVR are both excellent, lower priced alternatives. The ATI eHome Wonder is actually about half the price of the TV Wonder Elite, which means that you can actually end up with a dual tuner MCE box for the same price as a single tuner MCE box with the TV Wonder Elite.
By the end of this year, Windows XP Media Center Edition is supposed to have CableCard support, which will enable complete HDTV support for MCE boxes above and beyond the disappointing limitation for only over the air broadcasts that's in MCE 2005. Hopefully, this roundup will be a farewell to SD as we eagerly await the first HDTV tuners with CableCard support later this year.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
61 Comments
View All Comments
office boy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Interesting that the NVTV card here got the worst review and over at tech report got the best.I wonder if it has something to do with one being a dual tuner and the other well not.
Yeah bummer to not see the 150mce (and it's been in stock everywhere for a while, it's not in stock at newewgg cus they keep selling out, try amazon or buy.com)
Also I have to question the reasoning behind using actual cable TV for testing. The quality can vary so much, and we of course can have no expectation of what type of quality could be coming from your cable signal vs ours.
Use of some type of modulator to create a catv signal or a game system (like TR did) would seem to be a better choice to me, plus you could test with testing patterns.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Oh, I would also go to the following website if you have a hauppauge card: http://www.shspvr.com/This site has more current drivers for the Hauppauge cards, plus a pretty good forum with useful info. If you get the 'beta lite' cd packages for your card you get a easy to install driver package.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#48 I don't have digital cable but my understanding is that they can. The one thing you will need however is this: http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/38...and thats needed so you can change channels with the cable box.
I have a pvr-350 with gb-pvr and I couldnt be more happy with it :)
cer1 - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Ok, I admit I'm a total noob when it comes to TV tuner cards. I've been looking at them for awhile, but can't get my ahead around what they can and can not do with regards to the signal source. I'm always a bit disappointed when TV Tuner reviews don't exactly describe the video source used for the tests (analog cable, digital cable, aerial, cable company, etc.).My impression, which in all probability is wrong, is that these cards require an analog source and that they can not be hooked up to a digital cable source (such as I have from Comcast). Is this true, or can these cards be used with a digital cable signal?
ShadowVlican - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
i agree with the posts that 150MCE should've been included... great price/performance ratio for that cardto the freak that said 150MCE isn't widely available.. ur a dumbass! i can even buy one RIGHT NOW in freakin CANADA...
so yea Anand, ok review, but it needs 150MCE badly
glennpratt - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I swear no matter who reviews these cards, the results are always completely different. Some people find the NVTV cards to be terrible while other sites give em editors choice and the forums have equal amounts of hate and love for all the cards. Ugh, I'm ready for cablecards, I don't want to think about analog and IR blasters ever again... Cmon 2007!jamawass - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Volunteer website? Do you know this site was valued at $100 million at one time? This is a business dude. BTW What happened to part 2 of the Myth TV review?WooDaddy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Just to let everyone know, the eMuzed Maui has NO third-party support other than MCE. I had one and couldn't get it to work with any other app out there including sage and snapstream stuff. I ended up picking up a Prolink TV7000 instead. Compatible with the Hauppauge PVR250. Works flawlessly, but difficult to find.DigitalWarrior - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#36 (GoatMonkey) - For software to review, don't forget SageTV! This is superb PVR software.Good warning #28 (Kishkumen). A lot of 3rd party PVR software doesn't have support for ATI cards.
airfoil - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
The PVR 150 should have been included in this review - it seems like the best tuner out there for MCE. I suspect the outcome would have been different if a '150 was tested instead of the 250.