Cheapest ATSC Tuner

[cisasteelersfan]

I was looking at the Hauppauge HVR-1250 for about 50 bucks and it has pretty good reviews. It is not officially supported by gbpvr, but it will work with it right? I will be using to mostly record digital-only signals. Is this the cheapest decent option??

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

[johnsonx42]

It is officially supported by GB-PVR for Digital (that is, it's in the stock BDA.ini, and Hauppauge devices generally get Sub's blessing over all others). For analog it officially NOT supported, although it apparently can be made to work with the Hauppauge SoftMCE driver (which does MPEG-2 encoding in software).

I use the HVR-1250 only for digital. It has always been my best tuner... if only I had more PCIe slots I'd buy another. My HVR-850 (USB) isn't quite as good, nor was the KWorld ATSC-340u I had until it died (but even it was a little better than the HVR-850).

[persim]

I was in the same situation you are in, wanted a fairly cheap digital tuner that could do QAM (not sure if you want QAM or OTA). I saw that the 1250 was $50 on newegg and decided to try the ebay route. I just doubled checked that there was an entry for the device in the bda.ini and took a chance. Sub told me that as long as there is an entry that means at least someone has gotten it to work. I wound up with a Technisat AirStar-HD5000 for about $25 with shipping and it has worked perfectly for me. If you don't want to take the chance go with a Happauge but you could try something different if you want to try.

[cisasteelersfan]

Thanks guys. I just ordered the Hauppauge HVR-1250 for $50 at amazon. I hope all goes well setting it up.

[cisasteelersfan]

Alright, i have a big problem. When i put the card in, and turn on the computer, i get one long beeeeep. no video, no booting. When i remove the card, boots fine. What's going on? My computer is home build by myself.