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
The Test
Testing TV tuners, especially comparing based on image quality, is a tough thing to do; the main problem is that there's no good test scene that's repeatable across multiple systems. Testing video capture functionality is easy. Simply play a non-encrypted DVD over and over again and compare image quality - but you can't really tell a TV channel to put its contents on repeat so that we can see how the same scenes look across 6 different TV tuners.
Using something like cable on-demand doesn't really work either because then, you're left using an external tuner to actually get the signal, and simply test, the TV tuner's ability to capture an external signal, not receive and tune a cable channel.
Luckily, there are two TV channels that are perfectly designed for the task at hand: CNN Headline News and The Weather Channel. Both of the aforementioned channels repeat their content, usually every half hour, for several hours at a time. Armed with 6 TV Tuners and a Sunday of nothing to do but watch the same 30 minutes of headlines over and over again, we had our test platform. Even after doing this, it's still tough to get frame for frame, identical comparisons across the TV tuners. So often times, we'll resort to using different scenes to illustrate strengths and weaknesses of the TV tuners. Rest assured that our findings came to be after spending quite a bit of time with each one of these tuners.
CPU utilization wasn't a concern, as all of the tuners ate up less than 7% of our CPU while recording. Given that you can't really run Windows XP Media Center Edition without a fairly fast processor and that all of the cards compared here today are full hardware MPEG-2 encoders, there's not much to talk about with CPU utilization.
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overclockingoodness - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#7 (kjohnson): Did you not read the article? He said CNN and Weather channels are the only two channels that repeatedly show same programming in a given time frame. For CNN it's every 30 minutes.What's up with the "I hope that is not an indication of your ideology." statement. So, Anand can't even watch CNN and post screenshots because some readers don't like it. Why don't you just concentrate on other, more important parts of the review than worrying about stupid things like what he watches and what not?
I have never found Anand's ideology to be wrong, so even if he does watch CNN - I don't think it matters. Stupid people, stupid comments...
scott967 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
If you do this in the future, I would like to see a test of OTA ATSC reception for tuners. It seems to be a common problem with getting consistently good reception of the UHF band signal most broadcasters are assigned.Also, I found use of the terms "SD" and "HD" confusing. I have both NTSC and ATSC (8VSB) tuners, and the ATSC tuner receives either / both the SD format and HD format depending on the broadcaster. (The local FOX affiliate provides both feeds on different subchannels). ISTM that reception of the SD resolution is a little easier (fwerer dropouts) than the HD. I guess if you are talking cable, the SD/HD thing is not so confusing. At least on OTA, HD format can contain either SD material with pillars or HD, depending on what the network is providing.
gbrux - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Fine piece, Anand.However, the real excitement is high definition TV in the Windows XP Media Center Edtion 2005.
Last weekend, I watched on the Masters tournament in high definition from my local CBS station from my WMCE box. I have the ATI HDTV Wonder installed, and it has performed flawlessly sinced I installed it about four months ago.
I say, buy one of the cheaper standard TV tuners that you have reviewed, and buy the ATI HDTV Wonder (at about $150 some places) to build that WMCE box.
Incidentally, I'm going to put up a thread in the Forums with a step by step procedure for installing the ATI HDTV Wonder in a new WMCE box.
It'll be there in about an hour.
creathir - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
kjohnsonFoxNews all the way!
kjohnson - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Great review. But why watch CNN? I hope that is not an indication of your ideology.CigarSmokedByClinton - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Good review, but IMO this review without the 150MCE makes it almost worthless....The 150MCE is at least equivalent to the 250 but comes in at $65, the low end of the price range.
DigitalWarrior - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Interesting article, but it doesn't consider the Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card which only costs about $65 from pcalchemy.com (http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/21...According to this article (http://www.htpcnews.com/main.php?id=pvr_150_1) , Hauppauge was able to reduce the cost of the PVR-150MCE by using a new A/D chip that could handle both the audio and video conversion functions with better image quality than the PVR-250.
I just built a HTPC using three of these PVR-150MCE tuner cards, and I couldn't be more pleased with them!
DigitalWarrior - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
ranger203 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
BTW, Great article Anand... Hard to find anyone that spends teh time to rate tv tuners. My MCE 2005 Box works great...ranger203 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
What, no PVR-150, or PVR-150MCE??? I can't tell the difference between the 150 & 250 models. And, everyone always likes price: $75 for teh MCE version...