Media Center / Tv Tuner Thread

[PerritoBites]

Not too long ago my Desktop's motherboard died and I decided to get a small, but powerful laptop to use while I get an RMAed motherboard mailed back. Turns out the computer I got came with Vista Home Premium and a remote control. Home Premium comes with Media Center, which got me interested in getting a TV tuner for my PC. Yesterday I bought a TV tuner (ATI TV Wonder: Vinsion Tek HD 600 USB) and I have been messing with it for a while.
Edit: For infomation purposes, my tuner costed $77. (in case anyone is interested)


I ran up through a couple of problems... starting with getting HP's Quickplay (also included with the laptop) confused with Media Center's TV live player. I also tried used the software that came with the tuner, but that one was pretty bad. So after I figured all the things I did wrong... I finnaly found the Live TV interface in Media Center. Now I don't know what media center does, but the quality of the TV looks twice as good on media center than any of the other programs I was using. The record interface is pretty neat and simple to use. Still, I am having some problems with the TV reception. Hopefully someone on these forums is an expert and can help me out

Problems with Media Center Live TV:
-The first problem I encountered was with the colors. The quality (I guess you can call it resolution) is awesome, but some of the colors are bleeding... especially the red colors. (posted a screenshot below for reference) If you take a look at the screenshot below you will see that to the right of all the red players there is a sort of blue outline. Is there a way to fix this?
Edit: Added another screenshot where you can see the problem as well. On the second screenshot you will see that her face has a purple outline to the right of her face and a yellow outline to the left of her face. The outline is also apparent on other parts of the picture like her arms, fridge, etc...

-When I change channels it seems to take too long to switch it. I press the button, then the current channel blinks and after 2-3 seconds the channel will actually change. This is confusing and sometimes I end up clicking channel up a couple of times thinking the computer didn't get the signal and once it actually decides to change, it will change multiple channels. I don't know if this is due to my computer hardware or if it is something that can be fixed by tweaking the settings a bit.

-Sometimes there will be a very annoying sound in while watching TV. The closest I can compare it to is a sort of a dog whistle. Feels like it is a frequency of sound I shouldn't be able to listen to.. but it is there and it is very annoying.

Well, that is it for now, I will post additional info as I continue using it... Like experiences with streaming and other media center features.

[Erumaron]

Every year or so I get motivated to get a TV Tuner for my PC...and they're all so lackluster that I end up taking them back. Some day they won't look like shit and will work perfect.

[Brutul Tarew Marr]

I use Vista Media Center but I don't know if I can give you any advice cause my picture is less than stellar also. Also tried BeyondTV and had similar results.

The experts are at

The Green Button - Your Media Center Community

Home Theater Computers - AVS Forum

[The Ancient]

Originally Posted by Erumaron

Every year or so I get motivated to get a TV Tuner for my PC...and they're all so lackluster that I end up taking them back. Some day they won't look like shit and will work perfect.

I share this experience.

[PerritoBites]

Has anyone tried slingbox? I thought about returning this tuner and giving slingbox a try... but I dunno if it is worth twice the price.

Sling Media - Home of the Slingbox

Btw, their website is pretty funny

[Zippygoose]

Same here. I think I have 2 old tuner cards piled up in a closet somewhere. Am I just not buying a good enough card? For some reason it seems the bottleneck is my actual cable connection and not the hardware itself.

Edit: I've seen slingbox on a co-worker's laptop and it was quite impressive. That is my only experience with it though.

Edit 2: I've also used Vista's media center and the recording functionality was very easy to use and worked well. However, as I mentioned above, the recorded tv had horrible color bleeding and was borderline unwatchable.

[The Ancient]

Slingboxes are pretty cool. Works great with laptops especially since you can basically watch TV anywhere you have an internet connection, as long as someone at home isn't trying to watch on the same outlet.

[Brutul Tarew Marr]

I think it is possible to get good quality pictures from a media PC, but it's not plug and play. If you check out that AVS Forum there is really a lot to know about setting it up, adjusting your TV, etc. I have so far been too lazy to research in that depth and I'm not that picky about the TV picture. It bothered me at first but I am used to it now and don't even notice it.

[PerritoBites]

This post is a nice guide if you want to build your own HDPC media center PC.

Guide to Building a HD HTPC - AVS Forum

The guide is complete with recommendation with prices and different system builds as well as optional upgrades.

On that long post he recommends the following Tuners:

TV Tuner

All the models below support clear QAM. Among them only Silicondust HDHomeRun and AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe are supported by Vista Media Center as far as clear QAM is concerned, the others need its own application.

* Silicondust HDHomeRun
o Specs: LAN
o Price: $170
o Forums: AVS Forum (HDHomeRun - Dual ATSC or QAM to Ethernet Box)

* AutumnWave OnAir GT
o Specs: USB
o Price: $160
o Forums: AVS Forum (AutumnWave / OnAir USB HDTV Tuners)

* AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $85 (white box), $110 (retail)
o Forums: AVS Forum ( Avertv combo pcie tuner)

* Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $95 (white box), $105 (retail)

* Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $129

* Vista View Saber DA-1N1-E Combo
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $100

* ATI TV Wonder HD 650 Combo PCI Express
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $120
o Forums: AVS Forum (ATI 650 Problems)

* DViCO FusionHDTV5 Express
o Specs: PCI Express
o Price: $169
o Forums: AVS Forum (DVICO Fusion 5 HDTV tuner)

Only one of them is USB, but ill look into it.

Also, on that guide he has this link, which he claims to be the best HD pc tuner guide: HDTV PC Tuner Guide

[Deathwing]

I think the real question of this thread:

Why were you watching Rachel Ray?

[Nazbuk]

Here's something you can do with media center. I have a computer in the office that links up to the Xbox 360 that is hooked up to the TV in the living room. I'm using Media center as my TiVo since it's free. I've never tried viewing live TV on a PC monitor though so I don't know how to help you there.

[PerritoBites]

I switched to HD tv antenna and it looks good. None of the effects described above. I have problems with weak signals and not enough HD channels. Also non-hd channels can barely be seen (but that won't matter since those will be discontinued soon). So I know the tuner has the capability of displaying good images... now the thing is how to make the analog cable signal look better :/

Is it possible that my cabling is causing these problems? I am using a pretty old cable that I don't even know where I got it from. Maybe buying a new coax cable will help with the picture problems I posted on the OP?

[Erumaron]

Originally Posted by Nazbuk

Here's something you can do with media center. I have a computer in the office that links up to the Xbox 360 that is hooked up to the TV in the living room. I'm using Media center as my TiVo since it's free. I've never tried viewing live TV on a PC monitor though so I don't know how to help you there.

You still need a TV tuner in the PC correct?

[PerritoBites]

Wtf, I wasn't watching Rachael Ray (sp?) I was scrolling to the channels and saw that the channel had a crappy image! The soccer game I was watching wasn't even done by the time I edited that image in! Stop complaining about it!

[Jovec]

Originally Posted by Erumaron

You still need a TV tuner in the PC correct?

Yes, for TV. But the 360 can access the non-tv functions of Media Center without that computer having a tuner. Be warned that the 360 in Extender mode cannot play mpeg4 files, but it can play them if you use the Dashboard media player and browse to a shared folder or use USB storage. Also, I believe all decoding is done onthe Media Center computer and then sent to the 360 uncompressed, so you network and cpu utilization can be higher (I believe all Media Center Extender devices operate this way so it's not unique to the 360).

I switched to HD tv antenna and it looks good. None of the effects described above. I have problems with weak signals and not enough HD channels. Also non-hd channels can barely be seen (but that won't matter since those will be discontinued soon). So I know the tuner has the capability of displaying good images... now the thing is how to make the analog cable signal look better :/

Is it possible that my cabling is causing these problems? I am using a pretty old cable that I don't even know where I got it from. Maybe buying a new coax cable will help with the picture problems I posted on the OP?

Are you splitting the signal from your antenna into the both the cable input and Ant input on your tuner card or is it going only into the Ant input? Those names are slightly misleading, as Ant is for all ATSC content and cable for all NTSC content, so if your non-hd channels are broadcast in NTSC you'd need to connect your antenna to the Cable input. Also, most of these cards are hybrid tuners, meaning they can watch or record from one input or another, but not both at the same time. If you want to watch one show and record another, you'd need a second tuner.

Also non-hd channels can barely be seen (but that won't matter since those will be discontinued soon).

Not technically true. Broadcast signals over the air will switch to be solely ATSC, but they can still be of non-HD quality.

On that long post he recommends the following Tuners:

I would check LinuxTV.org - Television with Linux for supported tuners in case you ever wanted to try MythTV. A big advantage of MythTV is that the you can have multiple backends (to encode and serve media) and frontends (to watch media). One of the main reasons that switched me away from Vista Media Center was I could not use another Vista computer as an Extender to watch TV on it. Another reason is the lack of remote management/desktop capabilities on Vista Home Premium. The third was poor support for non-MS file formats. I will say that Vista Media Center is much easier to setup though, and its guide data is free compared to $20/yr for MythTV from Schedules Direct

As an aside, you'll want to look at this software for a better Media Center experience:

Codecs - ffdshow tryouts | The Official Website
MKV container support - Haali Media Splitter
FF/RW support and more in Media center for non-MS formats - Welcome to the Media Control Plugin Site

"My Movies" is also pretty popular for movie metadata - My Movies - Home

Same here. I think I have 2 old tuner cards piled up in a closet somewhere. Am I just not buying a good enough card? For some reason it seems the bottleneck is my actual cable connection and not the hardware itself.

Are they hardware Mpeg encoder cards or old-style frame grabbers? The former is what you what, the latter either won't work or require are encoding and decoding to be done in software (Vista Media Center and MythTV first (hardware) encode the signal then (software) decode it for live TV streams).

Has anyone tried slingbox? I thought about returning this tuner and giving slingbox a try... but I dunno if it is worth twice the price.

MythStreamTV - MythTV is basic sling-box technology. So is VideoLAN - Free Software and Open Source video streaming solution for every OS!

-The first problem I encountered was with the colors.

Assuming a decent signal, this is mainly due to the fact that NTSC is roughly 352x240 scaled up to 1600x1200 or whatever you run your desktop at. See if the image looks better in a window.

When I change channels it seems to take too long to switch it.

Likely due to the fact that Media Center does not show you the live signal, but a slightly delayed signal due to the encode/decode process necessary for PVR functionality. Watch the same channel on Media center and another TV and note the delay.