best DTV tuners?

Who makes/sells the best (IYHO) tuners for use with HDTV (or SDTV) monitors
(the kind without the tuners)? I looked around at a couple major brands
and I'm not finding this product at all. I was hoping to find something
that handled world standards, in addition to USA. But maybe finding any
product at all would be good.

Are there any that can deliver the raw bit stream before dividing it up
into subchannels, audio/video, etc? Maybe for direct computer input?

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Everett Ogden wrote:
wrote:


Who makes/sells the best (IYHO) tuners for use with HDTV (or SDTV) monitors
(the kind without the tuners)? I looked around at a couple major brands
and I'm not finding this product at all.


For all the heavily promoted "HDTV Ready" monitors you'd think there
would be more ads for STBs. But many purchasers rent digital cable
boxes, or buy the equivalent for satellite. And some just watch NTSC
analog on the built-in tuners and don't know the difference.


I was hoping to find something
that handled world standards, in addition to USA. But maybe finding any
product at all would be good.


Not much call for a tuner that handles world standards. How many
places are there where you can receive more than one? Even in the
analog realm you'd be hard pressed to find a tuner that handles
everything. Better to buy separate tuners for the standards you need
to deal with.

Among ATSC tuners, LG is well regarded for PQ. The LST-4200A tunes
ATSC (OTA) and clear QAM (cable). The LST-3510A adds a DVD player
with upconversion (but note that it is not a DVD recorder, as some
people expect it to be). The LST-3410A, now out of production, can
record HD to hard drive. It's had reliability problems, mostly
related to the Gemstar guide but also to heat. Many owners find that
it does what it does well enough that they will put up with the
problems.

Sony has two DVRs (DHGHDD250 and DHGHDD500, differing only in hard
drive size) with CableCard capability, which allows you to subscribe
to scrambled QAM. I've seen no reviews, but a search of AVSForum
should turn up something.

Are there any that can deliver the raw bit stream before dividing it up
into subchannels, audio/video, etc? Maybe for direct computer input?


Here there's a good answer. Add a tuner card with that ability to a
PC. My recommendation for a Windows-based computer is the MyHD line,
currently MDP-130, which tunes ATSC and clear QAM. The earlier
ATSC-only cards saved the whole stream, and you could select the
desired subchannel on playback. QAM recording doubles the bitrate,
requiring twice the HDD storage, so they added the ability to record
just the desired subchannel. That's a software change; it works for
the older cards as well. And it's a user option; you can still record
the whole stream if you want to.

Del Mibbler

I have found the only local store that carries many brands of OTA tuners
is Circuit City. They have Samsung, Pro, and ? in the $200+ range.
Fry's Electronics is inconsistent in they have few or none, the last
time I was there they had 2 Sony's with hard drives for $1000 and $800
that will record HDTV.

I recently purchased a refurbished Samsung SIR-451 through Amazon and it
works great in comparison to my ATI HDTV Wonder. The most powerful
local stations show a bit of stutter-step every few minutes when I use
the HDTV Wonder and there are several weaker local stations that
consistently have sound but no picture. The Samsung shows the weaker
stations without flaw.

I was thinking about building my own "OTA Tivo" unit based upon the ATI
HDTV Wonder and either the ATI software or Windows/XP Media Center. I
purchased the refurbished Samsung just to have something to compare to
the HDTV Wonder. The HDTV Wonder now looks like junk.

The MyHD card seems a bit pricy, around $300. (Did I hear ATI bought
them out?) Adding that to my home-build shopping list takes the total
above the price of the Sony unit. The total cost plus having to boot
W/XP before watching TV is making me look around a bit more before I try
building my own.

Roger

Del Mibbler ) wrote in alt.tv.tech.hdtv:
The MyHD card seems a bit pricy, around $300. (Did I hear ATI bought
them out?)

I certainly hope they haven't been bought out.

Nope, they're still made by MIT, but rumor has it that ATI was interested
in licensing some tech.

The MyHD cards are
worth more to me because they do MPEG2 decoding in hardware, while
most other cards do it in software. That drastically reduces the load
on the CPU and allows the card to be used in a lesser PC. If you just
use it as a tuner without trying to save to the hard drive, you can
get away with a 266 MHz CPU running Win98SE. They recommend 800 MHz
minimum to save to HDD, and XP to save files 4 GB or work with a
D-VHS recorder over Firewire.

The recommendations are very conservative. If you don't use the "overlay"
to view HD on the Windows desktop, you can get away with about 50-75% the
specs they recommend.

Like Del, I can't say enough good things about the MyHD cards.

--
Jeff Rife | "She just dropped by to remind me that my life
| is an endless purgatory, interrupted by profound
| moments of misery."
| -- Richard Karinsky, "Caroline in the City"