So how terrible are USB tuners?

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Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2005
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I'm thinking of making a SFF box with no PCI slots serve TV duty. Are USB tuners tolerable for watching analog cable? My service uses a Scientific Atlanta box that goes up to channel 99; will I be able to get rid of it?
 
The usb 2.0 boxes from hauppauge are perfectly respectable in terms of output quality, just a little picky in terms of drivers.

it sounds like you have standard analog cable - so the tuner will be able to capture all of those without the sci atl box.
 
no pci slots at all?....im assuming you at least have an agp slot for a video card, unless its onboard crap or something...but no pci slots at all? why not just 1?
 
WinTV-PVR-USB2

That box is good. I have one. Its basically a PVR250 in an external case. Same hardware encoder, etc. The cheaper usb tuners can be crap, as they generally use a much worse encoding algorithm to reduce the data to usb speeds.

Plextor has a usb box that adds divx to the hw mpeg2 mix if thats your kind of thing.

Any of the hardware encoders have a 1-3 second lag that keeps you from playing console games on them however.
 
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