Hi all,
Anyone tried getting an HDTV Tuner for your PC? Or considering it? I had been, and did take the plunge last weekend. I thought I'd share my experience in case any fellow raiders were considering it...
I bought one from the "Kaiser Baas' brand - it sounded German and so I thought it had to be good. But no. It was crap. I didn't like the software either - it was annoying.
A critical thing to mention here is that because it's connected to your PC or laptop, you possibly won't have it connected to your external antenna system. So the performance of the unit is important. The quality of the radio matters, unless you plan to use the external antenna, or have some really fancy rabbit-ears.
Anyhow, so I took that back, and got a more expensive one, brand being "Pinnacle". It is unreal - I'm really happy with it. It's a dual tuner one, which means that you can record/watch different channels simultaneously, but you can also operate it in "diversity" mode, in which the smarts in the receiver combine the two tuner signals and improve the net effective received signal quality. This sort of diversity receiver setup has been around for years in radio systems, especially with indoor receivers, or mobile transmitters, where nulls and fades due to reflections are common. So it's no surprise that it works for indoor TV reception too.
This tuner also performs really well in single tuner mode too, so I suspect the quality of the radio is much better than the other one. And the software is much better too - not perfect, but a lot better.
PM me if you want some more info. I recommend shopping around for a good price, and looking online too.
Cheers,
Jon