Sorry, same system build as my other thread. At any rate, he has a Sony Vaio Media Center and wants to have a TV Tuner card in his new rig. I’ve never bothered reading up on Media Center hardware so I’m totally in the dark. His current card is a Sony-based tuner/MPEG accelerator.
The only name I’m familiar wth is Hauppauge but there’s a lot of choices. Any suggestions - Brand/Model?
I grabbed one of these (the adaptec 3610) about a year ago – it was $200 w/ a $100 mail in rebate, so $100 for a dual tuner external USB card. It’s worked great for standard, analog cable TV for the last year, and it’s a cinch to set up in Media Center.
I bought a Twinhan ATSC tuner on sale, from some web merchant or another, and I absolutely hate it. It’s unstable, the software’s terrible, and it took me several hours just to find a functional driver. Stay away from that brand!
I had a Happauge tuner that worked marginally better, a while back. It was decent, but would shut down at random, screwing up any scheduled recordings. Okay performance when it worked.
The first tuner I ever had, though, worked great. It was an ATI TV Wonder, and it was solid as a rock. Intuitive interface, decent video quality, easy installation… If I had to buy one again, I’d definitely look at another ATI card, after my experience with the others.