Reccomend a Digital Freeview card

[petrolhead]

Looking to replca emy analog TV car with a digital one.

I currently use a Hauppage abd am wondering whats available and what you guys would reccomend

[Mr.D]

Nebula digiTV is about the best all round.
If you are using MCE you might want an alternative like a black gold.

[richjthorpe]

Mr D,

Why is the Nebula so good ? Is it becuase of the software that is bundled with it or is it a better picture ? I thought all DVB-T cards recorded the bit stream straight to Hard Disk so they should be all the same.

Richie.

Originally Posted by richjthorpe

Mr D,

Why is the Nebula so good ? Is it becuase of the software that is bundled with it or is it a better picture ? I thought all DVB-T cards recorded the bit stream straight to Hard Disk so they should be all the same.

Richie.

ahh, but there's the RF front end and the sensitivity of that, BER handling and some other bits and pieces

[Mr.D]

Originally Posted by richjthorpe

Mr D,

Why is the Nebula so good ? Is it becuase of the software that is bundled with it or is it a better picture ? I thought all DVB-T cards recorded the bit stream straight to Hard Disk so they should be all the same.

Richie.

Ease of use and reliability . Although the nebula isn't perfect I'me given to understand its much better than the majority out there.

It has reasonably intelligent deinterlace routines ( lets you manually switch between a bob for field material and a weave for film).

Quality wise the raw bitstream shouldn't be any different from any other device assuming reception is fine.

[petrolhead]

MCE?


How do these compare to the hauppage

[HiZ]

Nebula cards rock, the software is just great. All the features of a set top box. Subtitles, audio description, MHEG (kind of like HTML but for set top boxes). MHEG is the splash screens that show up graphics on radio stations for example and also all of the 'red button' applications like teletext. Some say sensitivity is slightly lower than others. RF loopthrough is a bonus too. Also streaming from one PC to another, 7 day EPG and so on.

Oh yeh...analogue capture too.

http://www.nebula-electronics.com/in....asp?Code=0001

Some for sale on ebay at the moment.

[Mr.D]

MCE compatability on the nebula isn't that great although a beta driver exists I believe, hence my mentioning the black gold.

The haupage cards ( the PVR series I assume you mean) have hardware mpeg encoding . This means they can capture an analogue source and compress on the fly to give reasonable files sizes.

The digital tuner cards will give better quality as they just dump the raw transport stream to the hd. Same quality as broadcast.

Some people use the haupage for Sky in conjunction with a digibox but...I don't like the quality from them myself.

[HiZ]

I've sold/selling my Nebual cos I have MCE and it doesn't like supporting dual cards too well. I've got 2 Black Gold and they're great with XPMCE. As a stand alone card with manufactureres software and remote I'd say Nebula all the way.

[MikeTV]

From what I have read recently, if dual tuner capability, MCE compatibility, or netwok streaming, are high on your list of priorities, then the Nebula isn't really there yet in terms of the software (it's unreliable).

But for single tuner, non-MCE usage, (ie. "the basics") the Nebula is good. The remote control has never worked for me , but I use a wireless keyboard and mouse. It supports analogue TV too, but there are better analogue cards.

The software provides tivo-like capabilties (tv guide, timer recording, etc), but it is nowhere near as slick or sophisticated as tivo. Pausing live TV, moving back and forth, do not work that well either.

Despite all the caveats, I still like it.