Digital terrestrial tuner

[Danti]

I'd like to buy a digital terrestrial tuner to record some tv shows. Actually i already have a standalone hard disk recorder, but i'm quite unhappy with it since if i want to transfer videos to my pc it have to re-encode the whole video again while it burn it to dvd.
So i thought i can buy some pci card or usb device for my pc... which one is better? There are a lot of brands most have the conexant chip, what is the best brand in your opinion? Does the recording software have something to do with the final quality or it just dumps the mpeg2 stream to disk? What is the best recording software?

[Przemek_Sperling]

So i thought i can buy some pci card or usb device for my pc... which one is better? There are a lot of brands most have the conexant chip, what is the best brand in your opinion? Does the recording software have something to do with the final quality or it just dumps the mpeg2 stream to disk? What is the best recording software?

From my own perspective (DVB-T, Poland) and experience:
ad 1. Internal devices are usually better than the external ones.
ad 2. I love AverMedia - good hardware, and what is even more important good stable drivers and long support. Hauppage made me sick with their drivers.
ad 3. Most software (all??) dump the video stream. It is a bit more complicated with audio - some software leave the streams "as they are" (AC3, mp2. etc.), some recode to AAC, e.g. AverMedia recodes the audio and puts the streams to mp4 container.

[Danti]

So.. no one else to give me some advice? By the way thanks Przemek, i've found the Avermedia Digis007 in my country, it looks like it sopports hdtv too. Do you use the external antenna or a stand alone one? Because my antenna plug is a little far away from my PC.

[Ghitulescu]

Normally, a DVB-X device will simply dump the TS to a file on your PC.
It is the request of the media content providers that the accompanying software should re-compress or modify in various ways the incoming signal. Bit-perfect scares them to death. That means the SW engineers spend time in order to provide modifications (drop all audio tracks but one, drop any other tracks, reconvert audio to another format, repack the file into a difficult to edit format, sometimes recoding the vido on-the-fly into xvid or other MPEG-4 flavours etc etc etc) to a very simple and straight binary copy :p (ok, error corrections should also be involved, not so simple ;)).
Once you get a freeware solution, like VDR on linux, you'll get everything back. Almost every SAT software can drive DVB-T in addition to DVB-S, maybe some drivers are needed, or some additional modules need to be installed.
I'm sorry I can't help you much with SW solutions, I use as always a HW one (a Topfield PVRt).

[Przemek_Sperling]

I currently use AverMedia Digi Super 007 http://www.avermedia.com/avertv/Product/ProductDetail.aspx?Id=21 exactly like you are going to use. Great tuner and it works with HDTV (tested with 1280*720 H.264 TV signals, Polish TV does noy broadcast higher resolutions) without any problems.
I use Mirillis Splash Lite 1.61 almost every day. I record signals from my computer tuner rather rarely (maybe once a week or so) and I use the AverTV suite then. No problems with both programs.
I live rather close from the broadcast centre (40 kilometres, with rather strong signal because the centre broadcasts with 100 kilowatts ERP power) but even from such a close distance I see differences between the internal and external antenna. Not in visual quality per se (I do not see any), but the external antenna is far less prone for man-made interferences like badly regulated car engines or malfunctioned electrical devices. When I used to use the internal antenna freezes or blockines were quite often and disturbing, but I do not experience them anymore with the external antenna. I currently use a 13 element Yagi-Uda antenna, without any channel amplifiers.

[pandy]

HDTV is only marketing word - most of modern tuners use for decoding, software codecs thus they don't care about video or audio compression - TS recording with optional remuxing to SPTS is all You need - all other works can be performed by external software (recoding etc).

Most Western Europen countries migrate to DVB-T2 so tuner should be capable to demodulate DVB-T and DVB-T2.

[Danti]

I'm sorry I can't help you much with SW solutions, I use as always a HW one (a Topfield PVRt).

Intresting, i could replace my lousy lg with a thing like that. I read that you can also transfer recorded stuff to the pc with the usb connection. Can you tell me what model is it exactly and if are there other brands with such a feature.

[Ghitulescu]

All of them (those named PVR) have either an USB or a LAN connector. Beware not to buy a "designed for" or whatever it may be called in your region, ie a PVR that is sold through the channels of a certain paytv provider: they have these "doors" fully closed.

http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/pvr.html

[Danti]

All of them (those named PVR) have either an USB or a LAN connector.

My LG do HAVE a USB connector but can't copy stuff to PC or even to a pen drive...

[Ghitulescu]

Have you checked the forums (for LG)?
Sometimes the manufacturers launch the products as they were bananas, they ripe at consumers (various bugs and improvements through firmware upgrades).