BlackGold/Sweetspot vs Nebula

  • Thread starter Deleted member 27989
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Deleted member 27989

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Right, I'm giving the HTPC thing another go as I have seen it's brilliance momentarily despite all the efforts of Terratec with its 2400 dual tuner card to zap all enthousiasme out of me.....

So I'm looking for the very best DVB-T cards available in the UK. I don't want any USB solutions as I have plenty of space. The area where I live is technically unsupported for freeview, however the two set top boxes (Humax) that I have in the kitchen and bedroom work perfectly fine with every single channel....

So I've tried the Terratec 1400i, pretty good but I just don't want to use anything from that company anymore....The picture quality of the Hauppauge HVR-1100and Nova-T just wasn't on par compared to the Terratec 1400i, the TwinHan's couldn't tune the channels on several muxes where I live....

So I keep on reading good, stable, solid results of the BlackGold also known as Sweetspot cards....And people also seem to swear by the Nebula cards.....

Previously the Sweetspots were less than half the price of Nebula, but as a Nebula can be had for around £75 now I am wondering should I just get two of those? I'm tempted by DigiTV and its PIP capability as well.....

Any thoughts?
 
As you posted in the MCE forum I assume you are using MCE.

Ive had both the Nebula and Blackgold.

Black gold win in my mind by a long way.

Nebula doesn't support dual tuners very well in MCE. They arn't as sensitive and they cost more. Their own software is very very good as a stand alone app and you get a remote etc. To use with XP you need the BDA drivers and a DVD decoder package but this can't 'sit inside' XPMCE. For that you may wish to try XLobby. Their own package supports everything XPMCE should like subtitles, MHEG, audio description and so on.

Picture quality in my mind is the same and only ever can be as the MPEG decoding is done by the PC, not the card. The card tunes, de-modulates and streams the program out, converting the 1's and 0's into nice pictures is done by the decoder and video card combo.
 
Thanks for your response....So the Nebula doesn't do multi-tuner with their BDA drivers....Well that makes it an easy choice....

I couldn't agree more that MCE should support MHEG etc.....

I don't agree on picture quality at all, I've had the various tuners in my system and did notice a difference....Could the difference be in the amount of error correcting that has to take place in stream.....

Are you saying that DigiTV and Xlobby do work together?
 
dejongj said:
Are you saying that DigiTV and Xlobby do work together?

I don't see why not, you can make it do anything with enough paitence.

2 x PCI Nebula's don't work..... well not for me. BDA's might be updated but for the price I really wouldn't bother.

One big big advantage though.... RF loopthrough.

Regarding pic quality, what was different. Error correction is ReedSolomon and the card shall correct erros where found, all cards should be as good as each other really. Its well proven technology.
 
another vote for the sweetspot had the fusion hdtv dual tuner , crap

bought 2 sweetspots installed one and its flawless so far when i can be bothered i will stick in the next one !
 
Anyone used the nebula topuptv card reader ?
Just wondering if its MCE compatible ?
 
Right I am getting convinced....Sweetspots/BlackGold it should be as I just want something that works with MCE...
 

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