UK Digital/Freeview Comapatible Card

[davecozens]

Hi,
I'm looking to get a tuner card that's compatible with the UK Freeview/Digital TV system, which ideally should be compatible with GB-PVR.

Any suggestions as to which cards work well?

Cheers.
Dave

[davecozens]

Also, I'm being a bit thick I suspect...

There's plenty of threads discussing recording 2 digital channels at once requiring 2 tuner cards, but what about watching one channel whilst recording another?

Does that require 1 card or 2, or does it vary from card to card?

[bgowland]

There's plenty of threads discussing recording 2 digital channels at once requiring 2 tuner cards, but what about watching one channel whilst recording another?

Does that require 1 card or 2, or does it vary from card to card?

You need 2 cards.

As to which cards work well with GB-PVR, I'm not sure. I have a couple of Nova-t 90002 cards and when the recordings work they are stable on playback with good audio/video so, in general, I'd say I like them from a hardware point of view. Unfortunately there are a number of factors that may or may not contribute to problems I see. I get varying results depending on which BDA mux I use - unfortunately the one that seems most stable for recordings (Cyberlink), has a nasty habit of causing an unhandled exception in the recording service about 1 in 10 recordings. The Intervideo mux seems to record gibberish most of the time. The Showshifter one is the one that I am currently sticking with as it doesn't seem to cause recording service crashes but I'm still occasionally seeing failed or truncated recordings.

I think you generally have to accept that BDA support is still new, in particular, DVB-T support as it isn't available in NZ yet for sub to be able to test it in his own environment. My PVR is as much a hobby as it is a household appliance so I'm pretty philosophical about it - if a prog. on a digital channel is a "must see", I record it on my VCR from my set-top box at the same time as with GB-PVR just in case.

Cheers,
Brian

[davecozens]

What about dual tuner cards.

They seem to support watching & recording simultaneously. Does GB-PVR support them ?

For example, the Haupage WinTV-PVR-500 appears to be a dual tuner. Has anybody tried it ?

[bgowland]

For example, the Haupage WinTV-PVR-500 appears to be a dual tuner. Has anybody tried it ?

The PVR500 is an analogue card but yes it does work with GB-PVR - I've got one as have a number of other GB-PVR users. When I said you need 2 cards, technically that means 2 tuners but I'm not aware of any dual-tuner DVB-T cards on the market.