Good TV tuner card recommendations?

[stustunz]

Can you move the card to a different slot?
try running the pc with the cover off ?
Strange things like this can boost the signal just enough for it to work

[Graham]

In the past my reception was borderline and I did notice some slight differences between tuners when scanning so you might be able to fix this with a different tuner ... but ... my experience was variable some days tuner A would scan more channels and other days tuner B would scan more channels. Plus, reception for recording would be fine even if scanning failed. At the time I used GBPVR and I could copy channels from one tuner to another. So I would scan and get a channels on A and missing channels on B ... I would copy channels from A to B and then reception would be fine on B.

I appreciate that you have been through all this before ... but ... Try doing a scan with all splitter and extension coax removed. If you get all the channels this way, you might be able to record on a "dodgy" channel after you put the splitters back. Plus, have you tried an aerial amplifier. A amplifier worked for me ... but ... I had to shop around to find an amp that had the most gain.

And finally, to answer the original question ... most folk seem to think that Hauppauge have the best kit ... but I recommend a new tuner as a last resort ... you might not get the result that you want.

[Kitchengoblin]

In that case, can I not enter the channel data in manually, into wherever NPVR stores it?

[Graham]

... can I not enter the channel data in manually, ...

In theory, yes ... in reality, probably not. You would need to edit the NextPVR database and add records for the missing channels ... but ... you would need to add records in more than one table and you would need to know values that NextPVR retrieves from the scan including, tsid, onid and service_id (whatever they are ! ). It's not something that I would try because I expect that I would stuff the database.

Forgive me if this is silly .. but ... can you take the computer to a chum's home (that uses the same transmission mast) and do a scan there? but ... there's no guarantee that recordings would work even if you got a successful scan.

[Elmo Putney]

If you can't touch the antenna then in my experience you might be able to improve things by optimising the cabling. Make sure wall plates are screened, low loss coax, good quality plugs and well made terminations. Tv tuners need a certain level of signal to noise.... So maybee you have a noise issue?

[Kitchengoblin]

As it turns out, I've had to move house several times in the past few years, and I tried this out at each place - no dice. I could always pick up every station except SBS.

That said, I've actually got two TV tuner devices, one of which is a card and one of which is a USB thingo. I bought the USB one, had issues with it (might have been this issue, I don't remember), and then cannibalized the card from a spare computer I had lying around, to try that.

So... I don't think the problem is signal strength or cable quality or anything like that, because I've had this problem at four different locations throughout Melbourne.

[johnsonx42]

to answer your original question, my experience on this side of the planet has been that Hauppauge devices have the best tuners, with their PCIe devices being better than USB devices by a small margin.

[Graham]

I've had this problem at four different locations throughout Melbourne.

It seems very very very unlikely that this is a signal or tuner problem ... Does the scan find any channels on the frequency/mux that carries SBS? Do you fancy trying another scan and attaching the logs?