question about USB tuners

[gangaskan]

i'm looking at experimenting with a USB HD tuner, but i am still unclear as to what you can or cant do with HD tuners.


mainly, i want to watch my digital/HD channels via time warner (i think i read somewhere its possible, but cant do on demand?) also, i wanted a second mpeg2 tuner for my current analog cable. i do have one extra PCI slot, however my maze 4 waterblock is kind of covering it

i am fairly confident my pc is capable of doing HD

specs are :
plain 256meg PNY 6800 PCIE
2 gig corsair / kingston ram (4x 512 in dual channel)
some NForce board (dont remember the model but its a foxxcon)
stock opteron 165 very limited on OC options due to my mobo
PVR-150 MCE
vista business
1x 160 gb drive
1x 250 gb drive


should i bother getting a HD tuner? or stick with a analog with mpeg2? mainly, my focus is on using it as a second source (is there a way to record with one source or does it just go with what is available first?) it has to be USB and i want to stick with hapaugee if possible.

can anyone shed some light on possible USB tuners, cheaper the better, but i dont want to sacrafice image quality for it being x dollars cheaper.

[sub]

I'm not aware of any USB QAM-capable (ie digital cable capable) HD tuners with analog MPEG2 encoding, so any USB device you bought from today's selection would not support analog.

PCI devices like the HVR1600 do give you good digital + MPEG2 encoded analog.

mainly, i want to watch my digital/HD channels via time warner (i think i read somewhere its possible, but cant do on demand?) also, i wanted a second mpeg2 tuner for my current analog cable. i do have one extra PCI slot, however my maze 4 waterblock is kind of covering it

The channels you'd get with a QAM tuner really depends on your broadcaster. It'll only give you unencrypted QAM channels. Usually only the local channels are left unencrypted.

[gangaskan]

the hvr 1600's do dual tuning from the looks of it correct? i'd hate to get rid of my pvr150 its been so good to me so far, also with the hvr1600 do you need to put cables in analog + DTV inputs i see 2 inputs one for cable + ASTC according to product description

[whurlston]

Yes. You would need a splitter and attach cables to both inputs.

[gangaskan]

gotcha one more quick question about the 1600's

just to clarify that i can use both tuners to record or watch analog no matter if its QAM digital or not?

[sub]

No. One tuner is for analog, the other is for digital (QAM or OTA).

[gangaskan]

thanks sub