Hi Avigrace
I use a pair of Hauppauge HVR-4000s.
The reasons were:
- I also wanted some future proofing (well as much as you can get with technology) so I wanted a card that could do DVB-S2 (although Hauppauge need to fix their drivers to allow this to work OK). I did check that BBC HD worked OK which it did. It is however currently broadcast using DVB-S but I think it is due to change when Freesat is launched to DVB-S2. I guess Hauppauge need to sort out their drivers by then.
Saying that, I have read that high definition Freeview will use DVT-T2 so I am not covered for that.
- I only had 3 PCI slots available (although I have 3 PCI-E, 2 free) and I wanted to make best use of them.
- Although I started with DVB-S I knew I might be moving where I could use DVB-T as well.
It was an expensive solution as they cost about £126 each but as I was building a dedicated HTPC from scratch I was not replacing existing cards. I bought one HVR-4000 to check that it would work OK in MediaPortal which it did, so I then bought a second so I could watch TV and record, or record 2 programmes at once. They have worked well like this in both Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista x86.
The one thing I haven't yet tried is defining them as a hybrid card as I have not had both DVB-T and DVB-S available at the same time. I know there have been issues with this in TVE3 and I am not sure if they are fully resolved. There could also be an issue in TVE3 in that both the HVR-4000 DVB-S tuners have exactly the same name when they are listed. This is also true for the two DVB-T tuners, so I am not sure which I would pair with which.
I haven't tried the analogue part of the card as I know it has a software decoder. I bought a Hauppauge PVR-500 and used that. The picture was not great (especially compared to DVB-S) but I think that was because I split the TV signal so many times.
As I have said, this is an expensive solution but it suited my needs and I have have been very happy with the results so far.
Mew