[geeks] Is there such thing as a really cheap HDTV USB tuner?

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Aug 25, 2009, at 13:39 , gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> I was thinking of asking a traveling relative to pick up for me a  
> USB HDTV
> tuner dongle.
> Here digital TV uses a modified to be incompatible with everyone else,
> version of the DVB-T system, so locally available dongles work almost
> everywhere except the US (and maybe Canada).

This might not answer your question, but here are some notes on the  
USB tuners that I currently use:

I'm using a Pinnacle PCTV HD 800e on my Mac Pro, and I record TV shows  
off of US cable using EyeTV.

It can receive standard US cable, digital cable, and broadcast digital.

You can also plug in component video to use it as an analog converter  
for archiving older media.

It is totally unaccelerated, so your CPU does the work.

Not all of these things are just tuners: some of them have decode/ 
encode hardware acceleration, and usually that only works with closed  
software like EyeTV and other commercial programs.

The upside is that the hardware engines can outrun my quad-core Mac  
Pro on video jobs.

The Elgato 250 series is nice and has a built-in 264 encoder that is  
supposed to be able to outrun a quad-core Mac Pro by about 300%.

You can also buy a pure accelerator from Elgato that does nothing but  
accelerate video encoding.  Plug it into USB and it acts as a  
coprocessor.  Again, have to have mostly proprietary software to use  
it, but they are very useful if you encode a lot o video.

I don't know much about units outside of Pinnacle and Elgato, because  
that's all I have used so far, except for much older PCI bus stuff.



-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."