replace pvr150

[chewy747]

just out of curiosity what would be a good replacement for 2 pvr 150 cards that I have? I may be looking to upgrade 1 or both of them. Right now all I have is basic analog cable in the USA. The abililty to record hd ota recording in the future would be nice but I dont know if my pc could handle it right now.

[mikeh49]

I have an ATI Theater Pro 650 that seems to work pretty well. In the PCI version, it has two tuners (one analog wit hardware encoder, one ATSC/QAM), but can only use one at a time. The analog seems at least as good as the 150, the digital is just fine, and it is fully supported in GBPVR and, as far as I can tell, in NPVR. You can get them on ebay for $25 or so. The PCIe version can use both tuners at the same time, I believe. I think pBS has one or more of these, and can hopefully provide his experience. There's a USB external version as well.

[chewy747]

thanks for the suggestion. it would be nice to have a card that has dual analog tuners that can record two at once plus the option of atsc/qam also. in a perfect world I guess

[pBS]

yea, the pcie one uses both at same time in all os's...nearly all of them work as dual in xp..but for usb one and pci one no win7 drivers enable both at same time...pcie version works well everywhere..
[ati says they don't plan on updating the drivers for win7 for usb and a few others,so waiting for updates won't happen]
but all of them should work as either/or tuners fine...[one at a time]
the quality is great, there's even a control panel applet that lets you tweak the filters for excellent results...[spatial and temporal filtering like pvr150 has]
called something like the ati video settings [ati's 6-6_t550_cp.exe]
i found the 8.11 drivers to be best, tho YMMV..

[ElihuRozen]

just out of curiosity what would be a good replacement for 2 pvr 150 cards that I have? I may be looking to upgrade 1 or both of them. Right now all I have is basic analog cable in the USA. The abililty to record hd ota recording in the future would be nice but I dont know if my pc could handle it right now.

Even with "basic analog cable" there is a really good chance you get your local stations over QAM, both SD & HD. I have a Hauppauge 2250 that I got from EBay. It has two tuners that can both be used at the same time & support analog, OTA & QAM.