[geeks] Is there such thing as a really cheap HDTV USB tuner?

[gsm at mendelson.com]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 09:29:38PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> This might not answer your question, but here are some notes on the USB 
> tuners that I currently use:

Thanks, I can search the web and find all sorts of wonderful answers, but real 
user experience seems lacking. Any information is useful, even if it does
not answer my question, as often I don't even know the right questions. :-)

> I'm using a Pinnacle PCTV HD 800e on my Mac Pro, and I record TV shows  
> off of US cable using EyeTV.
>
> It can receive standard US cable, digital cable, and broadcast digital.
>
> You can also plug in component video to use it as an analog converter  
> for archiving older media.
>
> It is totally unaccelerated, so your CPU does the work.

That may be a problem for me, my "Mac" is a netbook aka hackintosh with a 
1.6gHz Atom processor. All I want to do is to have a cheap dongle in 
my "bag of tricks" so that if I ever do go to the US, I have something
to watch off the air tv. 

More of a completeness thing. A relative happens to be there now, and if
you could get something for $10-$20, I probably could ask another
relative they will be visiting to go to WalMart or Target and get one.

It's just odd, the ATSC ones seem to be relatively expensive but the DVB ones
are available for under $4 plus $10 postage from Hong Kong, and the 3 weeks
there have been broadcasts here they have gone from $50 to $20 in price. I 
expect that the no name Chinese ones will go down to about $10.

I expect they will be very popular as there is a $150 a year TV tax (per 
household, no limit on people or receivers) here, but if you can buy a dongle
for your laptop for cash at a flea market or discount store, people who
want to watch tv, but not pay the tax, will buy them like hotcakes.

> Not all of these things are just tuners: some of them have decode/encode 
> hardware acceleration, and usually that only works with closed software 
> like EyeTV and other commercial programs.

Ok, that would make them more expensive, but better suited for the job.

> The upside is that the hardware engines can outrun my quad-core Mac Pro 
> on video jobs.
>
> The Elgato 250 series is nice and has a built-in 264 encoder that is  
> supposed to be able to outrun a quad-core Mac Pro by about 300%.
>
> You can also buy a pure accelerator from Elgato that does nothing but  
> accelerate video encoding.  Plug it into USB and it acts as a  
> coprocessor.  Again, have to have mostly proprietary software to use it, 
> but they are very useful if you encode a lot o video.

Thanks, I encode just about none, now that my kid's DVD player will play
"avi" files directly. :-)

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM