HDTV tuning

In addition to a standard video card, we’ll need an HDTV tuner card for this system. Compared to video cards, the selection of HDTV tuner cards is much more limited. These cards don’t support all HDTV sources (i.e. HD cable or HD satellite), but they do support off the air HDTV in the US. If you live in a major metropolitan area, you should have HDTV broadcasts from all major networks. In San Francisco, we reliably get ABC, CBS, Fox, WB, and UPN. NBC is in the process of moving their HD transmitter closer to the city. In comparison, in Los Angeles NBC-HD isn’t a problem, but UPN isn’t in high-definition. For cable broadcasts, you need QAM tuning and may need a cable card as well. A TV tuner is also currently required for Microsoft Media Center. If you can get off-the-air tuning, it’s often better than HD-cable. Some (but fortunately not all) cable companies will recompress the HD signal resulting in poorer quality, and some simply don’t carry the same HD content.

The choices for HDTV tuners with MCE2005 drivers include a budget model from AverMedia, the ATI HDTV Wonder which includes a Silver Sensor-clone antenna, and the FusionHDTV 5 which uses a more sensitive hardware tuner than any other PCI-HDTV tuner. The ATI and FusionHDTV5 are the same price at $150, but the AverMedia is under $100. The FusionHDTV5 is likely the best choice, but we went with an ATI HDTV tuner, because we can use hacked drivers.

With Windows MCE2005, a HDTV tuner cannot be installed without a standard analog TV tuner. This would seem OK given that the HDTV Wonder has an analog tuner also, but Microsoft requires Media Center 2005 TV tuners to support hardware MPEG-2 encoding. This choice by Microsoft reflects narrow-minded design choices. While the requirement of MPEG-2 encoding is important for having “low-end” PCs with a slow CPU serve as acceptable digital video recorders, this isn’t the case for a high-end HTPC. Likewise, many HDTV owners including myself watch digital TV exclusively. This is because non-HD shows are broadcast as either digital 480i, or more typically sent as upsampled 720p or 1080i achieved through the Teranex devices at the station itself. The hacked drivers for the ATI HDTV Wonder tricks MCE2005 into thinking that there is an MPEG-2 encoder, allowing you to run the HDTV Wonder as the sole tuner in a system. Since the antenna is worth at least $25, this essentially means that we only need to pay a $25 premium over the AverMedia rather than having to buy an $80 TV tuner card.

The default ATI software is unreliable. It worked well for me initially but stopped recording reliably a few weeks later. On AVSForum, the HDTV Wonder is called the HTDV Blunder. Fortunately, with MCE2005 you do not have to rely on ATI’s software.

ATI HDTV Wonder
http://www.ati.com
$150

Running Total: $770