Avermedia A180 HDTV OTA Tuner

[Crispy]

Anyone seen a plcae that sells this in Canada?

Crispy

[jeneral]

I have seen this card listed in Tigerdirect.ca for ~C$115 plus shipping and taxes. I'm thinking about getting one myself to use in a Dual-HD Tuner MCE 2005 system. I currently have an ATI HDTV Wonder but I read that MCE 2005 doesn't support 2 HD tuners from the same manufacturer. Some people have gotten around this by going with 2 tuners from different manufacturers.

[Kenbo]

This card doesn't appear to be a hardware capture device, like the Hauppage line of analog tuners. Am I right in saying that?

[Wayne]

Originally Posted by Kenbo

This card doesn't appear to be a hardware capture device, like the Hauppage line of analog tuners. Am I right in saying that?

That's not what it says on thier web site web site

Enjoy free over-the-air Digital TV on your Media Center PC, watch, pause and record Digital TV programs, especially 1080i HDTV broadcast programs like NFL Football or the Oscar. AVerTVHD MCE A180 designs for Microsoft Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 Operating System, it completes your Home Entertainment Center capabilities with High Definition TV viewing. Watch TV, or use the PVR and Time Shift features to Pause, Rewind and Replay Live HDTV so that you will never miss a moment of your favorite TV programs again

This card doesn't need an encoder since it is already receiving digital signals unlike the Hauppauge cards such as the PVR-150 or 250.

[Kenbo]

Originally Posted by Wayne

That's not what it says on thier web site web site This card doesn't need an encoder since it is already receiving digital signals unlike the Hauppauge cards such as the PVR-150 or 250.

Then why are there cards such as the MyHD which do sport hardware processing? Why would someone spend a few hundred U.S. as opposed to $115 CDN for this card?

[Wayne]

Originally Posted by Kenbo

Then why are there cards such as the MyHD which do sport hardware processing? Why would someone spend a few hundred U.S. as opposed to $115 CDN for this card?

It looks like that you need an analog TV tuner card to use this with MCE, but you can get those for less than C$100. Other than that I can't answer your question. But recording a digital signal is much easier than recording an analog signal - all you have to do is send the digital stream to the hard drive - you don't have to do the encoding so any digital tuner card should be able to record.

[jeneral]

I think you guys are getting confused. The MyHD cards are hardware based and thus offload the playback to the card (without hardware assist, HDTV stream playback can tax a 2+GHz CPU). These cards allow you to use a weaker CPU to record and playback HDTV. They also handle all the signal output. The MyHD cards are not MCE 2005 compatible to the best of my knowledge.

Most newer cards (ATI HDTV and Avermedia A180) use the GPU in your video card to assist in the playback of HDTV streams. This isn't as efficient as a Pure Hardware device but it still is better than no acceleration. They also require a decent video card to handle all the output.

The A180 has one more catch. It is an MCE 2005 card ONLY. That means they do not have their own software and if you don't use MCE 2005, the card will be useless to you. Maybe some other PC-based PVR software will write support for it, but you can't count on it. To use with MCE 2005 you will also need an MCE2005 MPEG-2 Decoder (Nvidia, ATI, etc...).

I hope this clears up the difference between the cards.

[Kenbo]

Originally Posted by jeneral

I think you guys are getting confused. The MyHD cards are hardware based and thus offload the playback to the card (without hardware assist, HDTV stream playback can tax a 2+GHz CPU).

Ok, so the main issue is playback then, and not recording? If that's the case, then yes I was confused.

At any rate, has anybody purchased this Avermedia card yet? For that price I am seriously considering it, but I want a good return policy, just in case I can't get anything OTA.

[Kenbo]

Bump -- Doesn't anyone have this card yet?

[brianafter8]

Yeah I have it. I can only get a few channels at the moment and for some reason ctv will not work in mce, can't figure it out. It works perfectly with avermedias software but for some reason it shows 6 numbers for the frequency?

[Kenbo]

I did end up getting the card too. I have never been able to get CTV HD, but I have not yet tried the Avermedia software. Does it do a channel scan?

[brainer]

Hmmm...sort of. These types of cards are usually already getting a digital stream of data, so they don't need to encode the data-it's already encoded.
For that reason, they don't need hardware capture circuits. They basically are there just to grab the data, and write it to disk etc.

brainer

Originally Posted by Kenbo

This card doesn't appear to be a hardware capture device, like the Hauppage line of analog tuners. Am I right in saying that?

[slamkal]

Originally Posted by Kenbo

Bump -- Doesn't anyone have this card yet?

I have this card.

its very finicky, you have to try various pci slots to get it to work well. In my case make sure none of your cards are sharing the IRQ with your video card.

some negatives:
I'm running XP and not MCE. The avermedia application for XP is pretty buggy. I am having problems getting the recorder to schedule properly. It will launch the application at the appropriate time but not record. also I am having problems with the channels "changing" in the scheduler (IE I set it to do channel 2.1 but it somehow changes itself to 8.2)

record on a XP3200 with ati X700 graphics is about 40% CPU for HD channels. Playback with their software is about 30%. You need DxVA accelerated graphics card.

With powerdvd 6.0 it does a wonderful job rendering the display and only uses like 10% for playback. The catch? the recorded stream from the Avermedia application apparently doesn't record the audio in a format that plays back using PowerDVD and turtle beach with SPDIF. So I have to rely on the Avermedia software for playback which is buggy, cumbersome, etc.

Avermedia support does respond and they have been able to duplicate the problem but I have not seen any commitment from them to improve the drivers or software to fix these issues.

I'm still looking for a good 3rd party recorder which can capture the audio with the video and then I'll be in heaven, or at least have a working pvr again I guess thats as close to heaven as I want to be ...

[beefgravy]

i have this card and it does pretty good output for CBC and CTV in vancouver for me. i use WatchHDTV and it records to a ms-dvr file with no issues. playback uses about 5% cpu with WatchHDTV.

i use cyberlinks mpeg2 decoder DS to render a very good image.

[kui425]

Originally Posted by beefgravy

i have this card and it does pretty good output for CBC and CTV in vancouver for me. i use WatchHDTV and it records to a ms-dvr file with no issues. playback uses about 5% cpu with WatchHDTV.

i use cyberlinks mpeg2 decoder DS to render a very good image.

You can do recording on WatchHDTV using A180?
I can use WatchHDTV just watching TV.