Best capture card for HDTV + regular satellite TV?

[bryan_chow]

I'm planning to upgrade my computer in order to record HDTV. I also record regular TV via a DirecTV box.

Will I need 2 capture cards if I want a hardware encoder for regular TV? Or is there a (good) capture card that can capture both OTA HDTV, and regular TV (S-video) from a set-top-box with hardware encoding?

Thanks...

[jebbbz]

As far as I know there are no HDTV PCI tuners that also have hardware encoding for analog broadcasts, whether OTA or via video input. (I wish there were such.) There is only one external USB HDTV tuner that has such capability, the OnAir Solution (formerly, Sasem). See:

http://www.copperbox.com/lite/onair.php

Their new version (with LG's 5th generation tuner, good if you have multi-path problems) is $250.00 while clearance on older models is $200.00 so there is a bit of a price premium to pay. I don't recall if they are certified to work with BTV.

[bryan_chow]

Thanks for the info.

So my best bet is to get a Hauppauge for regular TV, and maybe an ATI HD capture card for OTA HDTV?

[ZetaVu]

I have aver a180 for hdtv, no problems beyond the learning burps. I picked it up because I got a half price deal on it. Most of the others recommend the DVICO Fusion, which supports qam if btv goes that way.

I have the pvr250, no problems at all with that

[bryan_chow]

Thanks for the info. I'm going to do some reading on the forums for the best HDTV capture card (cost is a consideration as well).

[turls]

Wait a second, now I'm confused. Doesn't the FusionHDTV Gold do hardware encoding?

From the website description:

⊙ Includes MPEG encoder for analog TV/video recording

Latest CX23882 as Analog TV and PCI interface chip

I wish Snapstream would upgrade the knowledge base however--they break up analog cards into encoding and non-encoding, but some of us would like to use the same card for OTA HD and still being able to record SD from DirecTV external box (for example).

Even if this card is supposed to encode, how do I know it is encoding correctly? Picture quality sucks compared to my old non-encoding WinTV-D card (but after doing some reading here I have some more stuff to try, my picture is "washed out" on SVideo input from a DirecTV box).

[turls]

Well after I posted this was the first thread I had seen about this, I noticed other threads saying that there was only one HD card that also had MPEG2 encoding and it is proprietary and won't work with BTV. Even found a post where someone recommended an MPEG2 encoding SD card to go with a HD card.

I think Dvico's site is very misleading. How can they justify putting this misleading information? I'm still confused as to what encoding it is doing because if it is software based since I'm using BTV and not their software they sure aren't doing any encoding.

My main intention was not even getting HD recording since I only get OTA with it so I may not have even purchased the Dvico card if I wasn't mislead into thinking it was going to have better encoding than my ancient WinTV-D card.