So Which Dual Tuner Card?

[SparcEE]

From the looks of reading through the forum most of the PCI dual analog tuner cards are having issues:

1) Hauppauge PVR500 --> Way too many people issues with the new chipset
2) Avermedia Purity 500 --> Says that I should work due it being 2 250s, but in the forum came across someone who couldn't get it to work
3) NVIDIA Dual --> 1 person has it work and another has issues

I'm running with a single MSI 550PRO and really need to get more tuners since I've got the wife hooked on the GBPVR and now we have recording conflicts!

Buy.com has the Avermedia Purity 500 for $111 delivered, but I really cant find anything definitive that it does work...my plan was to get the NVIDIA after Fatawan's post, but someone else is having issues in the lower channels...

Any insight? I can add more MSI Pro's, but don't want to use up all my PCIs.

SparcEE

[-Oz-]

if you wait 5 days or so I'll have my nvidia dual (just ordered it and RMA'd my 500) and I'll let you know if it works.

I also saw on newegg comments that someone RMA'd their 500 directly to hauppage and got it replaced by one with the phillips chips. My old 500 works well, the new one did suck though.

The reason I'm moving to nvidia is I saw a review or two that said it has better graphic quality. I'm just hoping I can enable the improvements without using MCE.

[-Oz-]

if ya can wait mine will be here wed and be setup thur so I can give you feedback then

[jphhughes]

Since Fatawan had successfully installed the Nvidia Duel card I PM'ed him and he was kind enough to reply with the following .

"When I installed mine, I made sure to install only the WDM driver and nothing more. I already had the silver level PureVideo decoders, and I used the 93.81 Forceware drivers for my card. I see you have an NVIDIA card as well. Get the latest drivers. Make sure all the MCE processes are off. I can't recall what else was supposed to be installed with the DualTV, but if you installed other software with it, maybe uninstall and install only WDM would work??? "

I will give this a try and hopefully it will solve my problem. regards,

[jphhughes]

Well I followed Fatawan suggestion and things have improved a bit but problems remain. Before I could never get channel 5 to tune or come in this is Fox in my area. Now channel 5 is ok. However channel 2 still does not have color or sound. Channel 9 has sound but no color. And it varies with other channels. So still unusable.

[-Oz-]

so weird...

[jphhughes]

Yes and unfortunately it keep changing . It seem every time I restart GBPVR I get different results. Also if I change VRM9 to Overlay things change as well. So I look forward to your installation of the card to see what results you get. I suppose it could just be my configuration? Lucky me.

[SparcEE]

if ya can wait mine will be here wed and be setup thur so I can give you feedback then

Much appreciated...I will be waiting.

SparcEE

[-Oz-]

allright, i got it working, i actually played around a bit and installed all the software off the cd and every channel works fine so far.

Things I learned:
-it does its own deinterlacing if you set the decoding to nvidia; thus don't use ffdshow deinterlacing (it just makes the screen black)
-both are set to capture device #1 (tuner 1 & 2)

Other things: I can't do a direct comparison to the old 500 because the HTPCs are in different locations but the graphic does look good and seems to handle things like football pretty well.

Seems like a good investment thus far. I haven't tried FM radio yet and it seems that its not set to be enabled in direct.ini i'm gonna modify it and see what happens.

[-Oz-]

p.s. i really want to figure out how to access the settings MCE can, apparently you can tweak the card for even higher quality.