DVB terrestrial receiver cards (Freeview)

DundeeDancer

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Seems to be little information around to say how people rate the performance of Digital Tuner cards for watching Freeview etc. :confused:

Recently I set up a new PC system and installed the “Compro VideoMate DVB-T300 Combo PCI Tuner Card for DVB-T and analog TV reception + FM Radio”.

Which sounds all very whizzy but it didn’t perform to well in the number of channels it could detect. The card could only manage to pick up around 10 channels like UK History and other ones with a very strong signal. It could not tune in any of the main ones like (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, C4, C5). :(

I know my area only receives a medium signal strength, but when plugging in a stand alone Digital receiver to my aerial/TV such as “Matsui DTR 1 Digital TV Receiver”, I can tune in around 35 stations.

This happened at my place in Edinburgh, at my parents in Dundee the Matsui could pick up all the channels and the DVB-T300 card could not tune in any ! :eek:

Was thinking of trying Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T Freeview receiver PCI but was wondering if anyone else has had tuning problems with that card? :rolleyes:

Cheers DD.
 
I've had a Nebula Digitv freeview PCI card for a fair few months now, and have to say it's a marvelous piece of kit. I was going to go for a cheaper one until I saw that this one was pretty much regarded as the best out there. Found all my channels straight away, has a nice (if a little clunky) pvr function, and just does it's job well
 
I went for the Sweetspot myself. I had to do the registry change to pick up E4 but I think everyone needed to do that rather than it being a problem specific to the card.

I've got nothing bad to say about this card either- all channels seem to work ok.
 
I've had no problems with the Hauppauge WinTV-Nova-T, except that it doesn't get radio.

I didn't understand the E4 problem, that people seem to have had. Got E4 straight off the bat :smashin: .

Only problem now is the Artisan won't boot, so I wait . . .
 
SweetSpot MCE is a version of the Black Gold card and is now supported by software other than MCE.
http://mediaportal.sourceforge.net/ seems to be the best of these at the moment.
We had no problem getting E4 straight away under XP and this.

If you do searches for Black Gold freeview cards, you'll see more feedback/reviews.

One of the best features is that you can run 2 cards and get the ability to record one channel while watching another. (obviously you need 2 PCI slots).
 
The Nebula is very nice and has a fairly nice full screen interface. Picture quality is excellent. Two problems:

1. No BDA (?) drivers so that other programs i.e. MCE, MediaPortal etc can use it
2. In 6 months of having it had to be retuned due to some error or other it just wouldn't display the channels.
 

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