Need to upgrade my PVR150MCE

[liteswap]

I bought the Hauppauge PVR150MCE on the understanding that it's probably the most popular and best supported kit - but what I didn't count on was the poor video quality. The picture is soft and it tears when fast motion is onscreen. I've had enough of it.

So I'm looking for a top quality PCI analogue tuner card (we don't get digital where we are). Am I looking at an ATI? And if so, which one?

Some guidance would be helpful, please? Thank you.

[sub]

Most people are pretty happy with this card, so its could just be the combination of video decoder and render. It might be worth burning a movie to a DVD, then playing it in a regular DVD set top player to see if the quality is good or not - this will tell you whether capturing or playback is your biggest problem.

Some people give the ATI550/650 cards a slight edge in quality, but its very minor, and very subjective. Hardly noticable in my opinion.

[TornadoTJ]

I haven't seen the 150, so I can't compare them, but I will say that when my Theater 650 is working right, it's as clear as the HDTV tuner built into my television. When viewing on a 1080i (wish it were a p) 55" TV, quality counts.

[Carlito]

I have the same problem with my 150, tearing when there is fast motion on screen. My system is definetly beefy enough to handle the video, but I'm wondering if it is my video card. I have an GeForce MX4000 128MB pci card.
Would upgrading this card maybe give me better results? or should this card be sufficient?

p.s. sorry if i'm hijacking this thread, but it seems to be (possibly) the same problem

[sub]

I have the same problem with my 150, tearing when there is fast motion on screen. My system is definetly beefy enough to handle the video, but I'm wondering if it is my video card.

I'd say thats your video card, not the PVR150.

[Carlito]

any recommendations for a relatively cheap video card? pci or agp?

[sub]

No, not from me - but there are tons of threads on this in the past.

You'll probably find an ATI card suffers less from tearing than an nvidia card though.

[liteswap]

Sub, thanks for the response. I'll do as you suggest and report back. The tearing could be down to the graphics card I guess, since I'm using the on-board Intel i915 chip-set for graphics. Thought I might get away with not installing another power-using device in the box...