Norwood Micro Digital/Analog PCI TV Tuner Card

[unixdude]

Greetings everyone!

I just bought a Norwood Micro Digital/Analog PCI TV Tuner Card (it was on clearance for $60) It touts enjoying HDTV 1080i...

So far, I have found only three threads that mention this card. Two simply say that it is unsupported. One seems to infer that there is a way to make it work...

Do any of you have direct experience with this card? I haven't opened it, and won't until I here yea or nea from this forum. (I can return the card within 15 days)

Thanks in advance!

[sub]

To be honest, I've never heard of it. The analog side of this device is unlikely to work (lacks required MPEG2 encoder hardware).

If it has BDA drivers, then you'll probably be able to use digital side of it.

[SickBoy]

Norwood Micro is a CompUSA brand. Like sub mentioned, I'd look into what chips are on the board and what drivers it's using, and go from there. (Maybe try to find cards using a similar chip configuration - it may be a reference design)

I bought a cheapie Norwood Micro tuner card at one point, which used a common Conexant chip. I tried to get it working on XP x64 but gave up, since I didn't need another tuner that worked only in 32 bit Windows. Sold it to a friend who is just using the out-of-the-box drivers and apps for it....

[Mysteryman]

I did the same search when I saw the Norwood cards. When I found the mixed results from not only the GBPVR threads but other PVR software I looked elsewhere. It may be possible to get it to work, but with other supported cards so cheap, is it worth it?

I picked up a Kworld 110 for $67 instead ($52 if you're counting the $15 rebate). This is a supported card for GBPVR.

I don't have it working well yet, but one other thing that I didn't take into consideration was CPU/GPU horsepower needed for HD. My existing PVR-150 will eat only about 10%-15% of the CPU during recording and playback. The Kworld chews through another 50%-60%.

[mrxtc89117]

There's a link to this on another forum that might help you. Looks like it might be the same as the Twinhan DTV ATSC Hybrid PCI tuner card

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/archive/i...59307.html

[justinmiller]

I saw one of these online for cheap, plus it comes with an IR remote, so I thought I'd go for it. Since it is the same card as the Twinhan 3250, I downloaded those drivers from their web site, use their viewer app, and I can tune ~20 ATSC channels just fine.

Then I followed the instructions on the GBPVR Wiki about setting it up as a capture source; in the BDA Device Config it shows up as "Twinhan ATSC" when I have it auto-detect, so I used that, set up tuning requests, etc. Almost there! But when I try to watch anything in GBPVR, it says that the capture source is unavailable. Any ideas peeps? Thanks!

[sub]

You need to hit the 'map digital channels to EPG channels' button to trigger a scan.

[justinmiller]

Great, thanks.....okay I scanned the channels, tweaked my decoders, and I finally got something working! SD ATSC channels come in fine, I don't seem to be having any problems with them, however with HD channels things are still really touchy. Acts such as changing aspect ratio can make things jerky, and the more I play with it, the more I am still getting pretty regular lockups of GBPVR. The CPU is not pegging when this happens, utilization stays at about 35% of my Athlon X2 3800 processor. I am running an ATI X1300 card.

But the weird one is, if I view the file being recorded in explorer, it stops the recording to disk, even though the recording service continues to think it's recording, and it's damn difficult to convince it to stop recording after that.

Do these problems sound familiar to anyone? Should I forget this crummy little card and go buy a Cat's Eye, A180, HDTV5??