Recommendation for USB tuner?

[jonathankonrad]

I am a long term user of BeyondTV. I recently needed to change my downstairs HTPC. It was running in a big old, full tower PC, but I didn't care, since the basement was not finished. Now my wife needs it cleaned up. Since I do not have a lot of cash on hand, and the old system was running pefectly, I wanted to recreate what I had, just in a smaller box.

So now I have a shuttle slimline pc (xg41). Very impressed with this small box. Took in my older Core 2 Duo E7500 (2.9 Ghz) some cheap ram, and an unused 2.5'' drive and I was able to get everything working. However, the USB capture device I purchased (AVCPT) for $17.00 works, but poorly. It stutters for a while when tuning in for the first time, so recordings are not great. It also is very "digital", so lots of blocks instead of good filtering.

Can anyone recommend a good, working USB capture device? I have been looking at Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1950. It specifically mentions a hardware mpeg-2 encoder, which I believe is my problem. Anyone using this under windows 7 x64? Thanks for any comments and help. Sure wish this product was still updated.

[tscales]

Are you recording HD? If so, there is no encoding, so a hardware encoder doesn't matter. It just writes the stream to disk.

First I'd make sure you have a partition to which you are recording formatted with 64K sectors. Single most important thing, in my experience.

Past that, I'm worthless as my tuners are all PCIe

[jonathankonrad]

I am not recording on this box in HD. I Use this one to pickup TV and then recode it into MPEG 4 and use AirVideo to share it to my iPhone or AppleTV in other places in the house. So HD quality is not needed. Most of the time I'm watching on a tiny screen.

On the old PC I have an ATI 550 TV Wonder or an AverMedia Ultra TV 1500 MCE. Both of which recorded SD TV with no stuttering or artifacts at all on Win 7 x64 with a simple 7200 SATA drive (Honestly can't tell you which sector format I used.)

This new, smaller box has a better CPU, better RAM and a bit better HD so the only thing I can think of is the USB tuner/encoder instead of a PCI card. I'm not using tuning functions since I use a USB-UIRT and a Bell Satellite tuner. It's straight encoding.

This is early on so I can reformat into 64 K sectors. You noticed that much difference eh?

[jonathankonrad]

So I went ahead and purchased the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1950. It is a huge improvement. The tuning is now instant with no stuttering. I'm not sure if the built-in MPEG-2 encoder is working or not, but the experience is much better.

I also turned on the Video render mode to hardware instead of overlay and the picture quality is better. That was the opposite on my previous box, but it seems better on this one.

Thanks for the help.