Hdtv Tuner For Your Pc

[Seagoon]

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

[bmar560]

I've got one of those Leadtek USB ones connected to rabbit ear antennas as I don't have a roof antenna.

It's very good for the price $50 and at first I was using it with their software. Then I tried windows 7 which came with the revised windows media center. That program is the bomb !! tv guides are there and it made scheduling your recordings really easy. Try it out if you haven't, I didn't like the media center that came with vista but I love this one.

I reckon my tuner could perform better with a roof antenna, I'm not getting some of the channels if the weather is bad. There's nothing like watching live sports in HD !

[martymonsta]

Hi Seagoon,

So you don't have the new tuner plugged into any external antenna, just using the internal receiver?

Is yours a card or USB and are you running it off a laptop or desktop PC?

I've been thinking about getting one for a while now.

Cheers

Marty

[Bentstik]

I recently bought a HDTV tuner from Dick Smith for my laptop. The brand is Gadget Geek and plugs into a USB port. The software it uses is BlazeVideo and works a treat. Can record and comes with remote and antenna. Signal and picture quality is fantastic with standard antenna but you get more channels if you connect to an external antenna. Tried 2 other brands and returned them as the quality and software was shite.

Cheers Silvo

[Seagoon]

Hi all,

Yeah don't be afraid to return it if it doesn't work! That was my experience.

I'm running mine from a USB port on a laptop, with the antennas that come with the unit. The are these small little whip antennas, that are about 6" long each. I'm not close to the antenna cable and want to have the freedom to move around and take this in the car etc...

The second unit that I'm sticking with was so good that the little antennas are fine.

The thing with radio stuff is that it is so dependent on many variables that are hard to control and predict. Not like cabled stuff, that should just work...

My suggestion is go for it, and perhaps buy from a retailer that you know will not argue if you want to return it due to poor performance, so you can try another :-)

Cheers,

Jon