Lots of great recommendations in response to Saturday’s query about external PC television tuners. Click on the link for the full details of what Gizmodo readers had to say.
From reader James Peetz:
I have the Pinnacle Bungee DVD external usb capture box. I couldn’t be happier with its performance, especially considering my past experience with other capture cards. The original price was around $199, but since they were overproduced, you can find them for around $70 at Fry’s or Best Buy. The pros and cons are as follows:
Pros:
-external box does analog to digital conversion of video outside of computer, eliminating interference from cpu and and other components.
– S video, composite RCA, and Coax Cable connections
– Good looking external box with front and rear connections
– Portable box can be moved between computers
– Easy to use capture software from Pinnacle
– superior capture quality
Cons:
– Only records in DVD (mpeg-2 720×480) and SVCD (mpeg-2 480×480) formats, no capture in .avi format
Another reader writes in:
I, too, wanted to watch TV on my laptop. In my case, this was for camping purposes. Looked all around, found no PCMCIA card still being made that worked with any recent OS’s. Found some crappy external devices using USB 1.1. All junk. USB 1.1 can’t support anything like a good frame rate even with any kind of compression you try to do.
Solved my problem by getting a Canopus ADVC-100 which simply converts A/V
into firewire and vice-versa. Quite small (although way bigger’n a PCMCIA)
and simple, doesn’t draw much power. I feed a DirectTV box directly into it and then firewire to my laptop and use a shareware recording software package to show the stuff live as it comes off the firewire, full screen, full frame rate.
Definitely NOT a small footprint solution (and not technically even what
you asked for), but I watch satellite TV in my camper on my laptop, clear
as crystal.
From [email protected]:
I bought an ATI TV Wonder USB Edition for my laptop when I went off to college, thinking it would be a good way to catch The Simpsons and stuff like that from the local channels. It didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. The ATI has no built in antenna. I don’t know if this is common or not for an
external TV tuner, but in any case it necessitated buying a decent antenna from Radio Shack ($30-40 if I remember correctly). In the end, even the antenna didn’t help. Due to the location of my dorm room, and perhaps the construction materials used in the building, I could barely get anything but static, even though I was in the middle of San Francisco and on the top of a hill. Because of these circumstances, I got hardly any use out of my ATI, so I can’t really give you much feedback on it. Mostly I’m just writing to let you know that, unless you’re somewhere with a coax outlet handy, don’t expect to get much in the way of reception.
From reader Scot Shinderman:
You asked about pc/tv setups – iIve used both ATI TV Wonder and the Pinnacle PCTV products. The setup I have is a (relatively) old Dell Inspiron 3000 with both products connecting via USB. Both products have quite good quality, even on this unaccelerated hardware and basically turn your laptop into a nice flat screen TV – useful for NYC apartments. The feature sets are about equal with basic video recording although the .avi format from the ATI is a little weird and you might need to track down a codec (or convert) to distribute a clip. Playback windows can be resized, placed anywhere on the desktop and all that – time delay and TiVo-ish abilities seem reserved for the higher end boards. For watching Cribs or C-SPAN it’s just fine.
From reader Mark David:
I’ve owned one [an ATI TV Wonder] now for about a year, and until recently (when I got a new computer) it worked for well for watching TV. The box claims you can record programs but I’ve never been able to make it work – and even if it did, the disk space the recorded program would take up would be massive – certainly too much for a laptop. With my new computer, the video card that came pre-installed in it was not compatible – and as I’ve found out most video cards made by Intel are not – so check what type of video card you’ve got – my old one was an ATI and of course there weren’t any problems. Also be sure you have the latest Direct X drivers too! If all you want to do is watch TV on your laptop then go for it – if you want to be able to recorded a program with it then stay away.
From reader Raymond Pirouz:
Yes, I have the ATI TV Wonder USB and it works perfectly for my needs. I also had the PCI version of their card before, but had a similar situation to you where I wanted something for my laptop. The USB version uses the very same software as the PCI version, so as far as that’s concerned, it’s the same functionality. I haven’t noticed any performance hits due to the USB connection, so if your goal is to display/record TV or VHS broadcasts on a laptop, this is an adequate product.
There are a couple other vendors who provide similar functionality, but for
TV on PC viewing, I haven’t found a better alternative to the products by ATI.
Here’s the manufacturer page: http://mirror.ati.com/products/pc/tv…
I’d also look at their TECHNICAL ISSUES page for the product just in case
you have a setup that may qualify you for one of the outstanding issues: http://mirror.ati.com/support/produc…
Good luck.
From reader Paul M. Johnson:
tried using the ATI TV Wonder USB. I wasn’t very pleased with it.
So I returned it and picked up a Hauppauge WinTV USB. I’ve been using that since. It works nicely. I even used it for a couple weeks as my primary TV. The only problem was the viewing angle on the laptop is not ideal except for straight on. But I’ve been happy with it. I even had my TiVo hooked into it.
And last, but not least, a reader writes in with a link to page that suggests that the low data rate of USB is the reason why picture quality suffers so much with these external TV tuners for PCs: http://www.tv-cards.com/index.php?page…
