MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2005 6:26 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Fourth Place: AVerMedia M150
The AVerMedia M150 is an OEM TV tuner that ships with many MCE PCs, but is identical to the retail AVerMedia 1500 MCE. The M150 still uses an analog Philips tuner, but there are no real issues with going that route.
The image quality of the M150 is actually fairly difficult to discern from the third place TV tuners of this comparison in all but one aspect: text display.
The overall picture looks reasonable...
The M150 actually displayed the worst example of artifacts in text effects of any of the cards in this roundup. You can see a perfect example of that below:
Not so good - these sort of artifacts should not be present. The text itself is legible, but everything around it is distracting.
Other than the text issue, the picture quality of the M150 is pretty decent for a SD tuner. A big issue we found is that regardless of how good the tuner happens to be, the absolutely poor quality of SD cable made it very difficult for one tuner to hold an advantage over another. The biggest differences between many of these tuners happen to be in their handling of text on the screen.
The AVerMedia M150 can be found for around $60.
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office boy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Interesting that the NVTV card here got the worst review and over at tech report got the best.I wonder if it has something to do with one being a dual tuner and the other well not.
Yeah bummer to not see the 150mce (and it's been in stock everywhere for a while, it's not in stock at newewgg cus they keep selling out, try amazon or buy.com)
Also I have to question the reasoning behind using actual cable TV for testing. The quality can vary so much, and we of course can have no expectation of what type of quality could be coming from your cable signal vs ours.
Use of some type of modulator to create a catv signal or a game system (like TR did) would seem to be a better choice to me, plus you could test with testing patterns.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Oh, I would also go to the following website if you have a hauppauge card: http://www.shspvr.com/This site has more current drivers for the Hauppauge cards, plus a pretty good forum with useful info. If you get the 'beta lite' cd packages for your card you get a easy to install driver package.
dgkulzer - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#48 I don't have digital cable but my understanding is that they can. The one thing you will need however is this: http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/38...and thats needed so you can change channels with the cable box.
I have a pvr-350 with gb-pvr and I couldnt be more happy with it :)
cer1 - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Ok, I admit I'm a total noob when it comes to TV tuner cards. I've been looking at them for awhile, but can't get my ahead around what they can and can not do with regards to the signal source. I'm always a bit disappointed when TV Tuner reviews don't exactly describe the video source used for the tests (analog cable, digital cable, aerial, cable company, etc.).My impression, which in all probability is wrong, is that these cards require an analog source and that they can not be hooked up to a digital cable source (such as I have from Comcast). Is this true, or can these cards be used with a digital cable signal?
ShadowVlican - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
i agree with the posts that 150MCE should've been included... great price/performance ratio for that cardto the freak that said 150MCE isn't widely available.. ur a dumbass! i can even buy one RIGHT NOW in freakin CANADA...
so yea Anand, ok review, but it needs 150MCE badly
glennpratt - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I swear no matter who reviews these cards, the results are always completely different. Some people find the NVTV cards to be terrible while other sites give em editors choice and the forums have equal amounts of hate and love for all the cards. Ugh, I'm ready for cablecards, I don't want to think about analog and IR blasters ever again... Cmon 2007!jamawass - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Volunteer website? Do you know this site was valued at $100 million at one time? This is a business dude. BTW What happened to part 2 of the Myth TV review?WooDaddy - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
Just to let everyone know, the eMuzed Maui has NO third-party support other than MCE. I had one and couldn't get it to work with any other app out there including sage and snapstream stuff. I ended up picking up a Prolink TV7000 instead. Compatible with the Hauppauge PVR250. Works flawlessly, but difficult to find.DigitalWarrior - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
#36 (GoatMonkey) - For software to review, don't forget SageTV! This is superb PVR software.Good warning #28 (Kishkumen). A lot of 3rd party PVR software doesn't have support for ATI cards.
airfoil - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
The PVR 150 should have been included in this review - it seems like the best tuner out there for MCE. I suspect the outcome would have been different if a '150 was tested instead of the 250.