Recommendation for good (cheap :) ) HD tuner for UK Freeview?

[boringgit]

cool. £70 sounds like a good deal to me and there is no reason why you should have any problems.

absolutely. I have windows power management set to put the pc to sleep after 30mins of idle activity. It wakes up to record programs (npvr adds a wake up even to the bios) and goes to sleep when idle. I think npvr also has some login to send "stay awake" signals to the pc when a recording is imminent. It never misses a recording. I think there are many folks here that do the same and probably some that leave it running 24x7.

Yeah, I set that up recently and it runs well with the USB stick, but I saw people were having issues with the BG card not being rediscovered by media centre on resume from standby. Was just a bit concerned after buying it that I hadn't thought to ask (My microserver doesnt actually support standby - I have to hibernate - a bit irritating when you have to wake it up, but I can live with it!)

Could I suggest that if a mod is interested, it might be handy to have a sticky thread where people can list the card / stick they use and report how well it works? I'm hopefully sorted now - but might be nice for others....

[fuzzweed]

The blackgold drivers are buggy as shite (IMO ) with not much active updating as far as I can tell . Certainly compared to the Hauppauge (non-HD) cards I used to have. My system lives on a knife edge of stability with two BG cards in it!

[gEd]

Perhaps the reason that BG don't release new drivers every 2 months, is because their drivers are stable!

I had a Hauppauge PVR-350 and 2 x Nova-T USB2 which all had problems with resume from standby on 2 different motherboards.
The PVR-350's resume problems were infamous as were the PVR-150 time stamp problems that affected a whole bunch of users.

I have had zero problems with my BG tuner.

[fuzzweed]

Guess it's hardware dependant. Of the two sets of BG drivers available, one doesn't work at all, and the other I have to run a devcon batch file to disable and re-enable the tuners every reboot or they won't respond, and then they take two tuning attempts before becoming useful.
I take your point that the HP drivers were continually being updated, so I guess someone somewhere must have had issues, but nothing I ever saw.

[gEd]

That's pretty annoying and yes, there can be problems with hardware inter dependencies. You may well be the first / only person to ever test that tuner in that mobo with your specific bios settings and other hardware devices. the only way to totally avoid this risk is to buy into a closed system such as Apple where they actively test and certify the components used in their system.

What tuner are you using as the only recommended drivers for the BG3620 are 8.1.1.2.