Avermedia A180 HDTV OTA Tuner
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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.
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.Kenbo said:
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.
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.
Ok, so the main issue is playback then, and not recording? If that's the case, then yes I was confused.jeneral said:
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.
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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?
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
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
Kenbo said:
I have this card.Kenbo said:
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 ...
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.
i use cyberlinks mpeg2 decoder DS to render a very good image.
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I use the A180 as well, with the WatchHDTV application. My Athlon Xp2500m is Overclocked to 2.3Ghz, and I am seeing CPU utilization in the range of 20-25%. If I am timeshifting it jumps to about 30%. WatchHDTV does a much better job than the Avermedia software. I find the stuttering much worse and my cpu utilization cycles between 20 and 60% constantly. WatchHDTV rules.
Just to clear up confusion about HVTV cards and MCE2005 in Canada.
You can NOT use MCE 2005 to watch OTA HDTV in Canada - unless - you tell MCE you are in the US.
MCE 2005's Guide has data for HDTV in Canada, but MCE itself does not allow the guide to use the data to tune your card for use within MCE. So, unless you tell it you are in the US and allow it to scan for channels - it will not work.
Vista will fix this - but the wait will be a while!
Hope this explains why some are having issues. It is NOT the card, nor the guide - but MCE itself.
Stu
You can NOT use MCE 2005 to watch OTA HDTV in Canada - unless - you tell MCE you are in the US.
MCE 2005's Guide has data for HDTV in Canada, but MCE itself does not allow the guide to use the data to tune your card for use within MCE. So, unless you tell it you are in the US and allow it to scan for channels - it will not work.
Vista will fix this - but the wait will be a while!
Hope this explains why some are having issues. It is NOT the card, nor the guide - but MCE itself.
Stu
Hi,
I have my OTA setup in MCE to synchronize with Canadian listings. The only reason you would need to enter the US Zip code is to tell MCE to activate the ATSC card. After that, the guide is only a downloaded file.
I have instructions here: http://mcehq.sensuz.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=13
What this allows you to do is to have MCE activate the ATSC card, and then you can setup the guide to download the appropriate information.
I have my OTA setup in MCE to synchronize with Canadian listings. The only reason you would need to enter the US Zip code is to tell MCE to activate the ATSC card. After that, the guide is only a downloaded file.
I have instructions here: http://mcehq.sensuz.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=13
What this allows you to do is to have MCE activate the ATSC card, and then you can setup the guide to download the appropriate information.
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