Dual DVB-T tuner for UK? (2 Viewers)

[Wonderbadger]

Hi,
I recently bought a Hauppauge diversity dual tuner USB stick and promptly returned it. The picture quality through mediaportal was very poor compared to my existing Nova-T USB2 external box from 5 years ago which produces very good sharp images. The diversity stick was working in dual tuner mode and with the latest drivers.

Can anyone recommend a good USB attached dual tuner card with good picture quality? Either that or I am going to hunt down another of the old Happauge boxes as they seem to do the job very well compared to the new kit.

Thanks
Andy

 

[tompa]

Hi!

I'm running two Hauppauge Nova TD with no problem at all. I dont think you had a problem with the tuner, probably a codec issue?

/tompa

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Look for the Peak Dual, mainly sold on ebay, they do dual pci\usb versions for around the 30 pound price range.

 

[Raveen]

How do the PCI versions work? I thought that a PCI card could only carry enough data to be good for one tuner?

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

How do the PCI versions work? I thought that a PCI card could only carry enough data to be good for one tuner?

I have not a clue where you got that idea from as there are quite a few dual pci tuners out there, and bandwidth on the pci bus is way more than a tuner needs to copy file to hdd, the most internal tv tuners that have been tested working is 7

 

[Raveen]

That's what I would have thought to be honest, but I've never seen a dual tuner PCI card before. PCI-E yes, USB yes, PCI no.

Weird Thanks for the answer anyway

 

[funkstar]

That's what I would have thought to be honest, but I've never seen a dual tuner PCI card before. PCI-E yes, USB yes, PCI no.

Weird Thanks for the answer anyway

I've had the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 (dual tuner PCI) for years. The issue that manufacturers had to work around was the BDA driver platform in windows cannot deal with multiple tuners on a single PCI interface. How they generally get round it is to have a USB controller on the card and multiple USB connected tuners on the card as well. That way Windows sees them not as a PCI connected tuner, but multiple USB tuners.

The Nova-T has some issues with resume from S3 and slow channel switching at times. I've heard good things about the Peak cards. Tempted to get one to give it a go.

 

[Raveen]

Ah, so that's the limitation! I'd assumed it was a limit on the old PCI bus. Cheers funkstar, it's always good to learn something new

 

[funkstar]

Standard. plane old PCI is capable of 133MB/sec (that's 133 megabytes per second).

DVB-T has a maximum data rate for a single multiplex of around 32Mbit/sec (that's 32megabits per second). In other words, you could probably squeeze 32 DVB-T transport streams down the PCI bus, that's probably more than 6 times the total transmitted data of the complete Freeview line up

And to expand on my previous reply a little, PCIe works differently to PCI and each physical card can appear to the host OS as multiple logical cards, so this BDA limitation does not matter for them. So in theory PCIe cards should be more stable as they do not require USB bridges or the associated drivers (USB drivers can be horrible and temperamental).

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Look for the Peak Dual, mainly sold on ebay, they do dual pci\usb versions for around the 30 pound price range.

Got price down to £23.93 at Amazon, now thats a bargain