HTPC - TV Tuner Reviews

Conclusion

Have we found a new champion TV Tuner card? That depends on what you're looking for. All three of the cards have something to offer, and unfortunately, no single card is going to please every potential user. Here's how we see the breakdown of cards.

For the best analog picture experience, the ATI Theater 550 cards continue to get our recommendation. The included software with the PowerColor card was disappointing with its lack of an EPG - though European customers won't have a problem - but the quality was still great and the card is Windows MCE compatible. If analog support is still moderately important, yet you also want HDTV support, the Fusion5 card does okay. If you pair it with Windows MCE for analog channels and only use FusionHDTV for the HD channels, the end result is generally good. The MyHD card really has difficulties with analog channels, unfortunately, but it comes out on top in DTV reception, and if you throw enough processing power at the problem, the analog capabilities match and even surpass the Fusion5.

OTA DTV support can be found in quite a few other products that cost less than either the Fusion5 or MyHD. If that's all you're after, you would probably be better off getting a good DTV tuner and a good analog tuner for now. If you can't get a good terrestrial signal, though, the Fusion5 and MyHD become interesting. For QAM support, the MyHD wins out, but since both cards are just capturing a transport stream, there isn't a difference in quality. MyHD's lack of MCE support is a minor drawback as the UI could use some improvements, but it's something that you can learn to live with. If you plan on using the MyHD with an HDTV, we would also recommend the DVI daughtercard or a VGA to component transcoder.

The real problem with the QAM cards is that you're spending quite a bit of money for hardware that might be obsolete in a year (when CableCard will apparently finally debut alongside Windows Vista). If you already have digital cable with HD support, it's probably a $10 per month or less increase to get a DVR box upgrade. $10 per month means that you can get two years of DVR use with all of your channels for the price of the MyHD+DVI, or just over a year for the price of the Fusion5 Gold. Of course, you have far less hard drive capacity (40 or 80 GB is typical in set-top cable boxes), and you can't burn the files to a DVDR, share them with friends, or watch them from another computer. If that's what you're after, and if you've already spent the money on a nice HDTV, $250 for the MyHD plus DVI card is going to get you some fun toys to play with. Also, if you just have standard cable, it's closer to $15 or $20 a month to upgrade to HDTV plus DVR.

If you can live without DTV support (or if you don't have an HDTV), and you want a PCI Express TV Tuner, you'll be very pleased with the PowerColor card. If you don't care about the PCI Express interface - and it really doesn't add anything in terms of quality or performance - then getting any of the other Theater 550 PCI cards will also work. It's nice to see that the price premium for the PCIe version of the card really isn't that big; you can find the PowerColor PCIe T55E-PO3 from Newegg for $94 shipped, while the PowerColor T55-PO3 costs about $85 shipped. There are probably some Shuttle SN25P owners who will be glad to find a use for their PCIe X1 slot.

Overall, none of the cards reviewed today are perfect. There are three options covered here: great analog with no digital; great digital with no analog recording unless you have a dual-core system; or decent analog and great digital with a slightly less friendly user interface. What we really want now is to have ATI, PowerColor, or someone else equal the analog quality of the Theater 550 and add in DTV support - and personally the QAM support is required, as OTA just doesn't work for my needs. Even though dealing with the numerous sub-channels on digital cable can be irritating, it's better than not to have the ability to receive those channels at all.

While we're making requests, we'd like to see something combining the best of both the Fusion and MyHD cards (and software) into a single option. It shouldn't be that difficult to modify the MyHD to get analog encoding performance closer to the level of the Fusion5. Maybe we'll see this in something like a MyHD MDP-140. Fully integrated and working EPGs for all three cards should also be way up on the "to-do" lists for these companies. The last item for our wish list isn't targeted at the manufacturers; rather, we would like to plead for all the broadcast companies to shift to full HDTV. Hopefully, with the release of the Xbox 360 and the upcoming PlayStation 3, HDTV adoption will finally reach the point where broadcast companies create HDTV content and downsample it to analog resolutions, rather than recording analog or SDTV and scaling the content to HDTV resolutions. (Yeah, I know - I'm dreaming.)

With all that said, if I had to go out and buy a TV tuner card right now, the MyHD MDP-130 would be my choice. It's expensive and the analog has steep hardware demands, but I can handle both of those requirements. I can even deal with the less-than-perfect user interface - if you've ever installed Linux and managed to get it hooked up to the Internet and playing video, you can certainly handle the MyHD software. This is not a wholesale recommendation, but the MyHD fills an important niche for people like me. If you want both digital and analog support and you lack a dual core system for running the MyHD, adding in something like the PowerColor for your analog channels is also a reasonable choice.