MCE TV Tuner Roundup: Featuring ATI's Theater 550 & NVIDIA's NVTV
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2005 6:26 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Third Place - Tie: eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR
For the third place runner-up, we have a tie between the eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR and ATI's eHome Wonder PCI.
The eMuzed Maui-II PCI PVR is another very common OEM solution and despite the fact that it uses the same LSI DVXPLORE codec as NVIDIA's NVTV, the Philips analog tuner ensures that we don't have the same grainy picture issues that we had with NVIDIA's card.
The Maui offered fairly competitive picture quality, although slightly noisier than our first and second place offerings. Once again, we see that the biggest problem ends up being how the tuner handles text. With fewer artifacts than the fourth place AVerMedia, eMuzed still can't display text perfectly. It's not exactly text, but rather borders with any sort of movement in them is where you get most of the problems.
Note the dots in the line above the text
The text artifacts are present here as well.
You can get an idea of some of the level of noise here.
Although it's fairly hard to find, the eMuzed Maui-II goes for under $99.
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overclockingoodness - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
#7 (kjohnson): Did you not read the article? He said CNN and Weather channels are the only two channels that repeatedly show same programming in a given time frame. For CNN it's every 30 minutes.What's up with the "I hope that is not an indication of your ideology." statement. So, Anand can't even watch CNN and post screenshots because some readers don't like it. Why don't you just concentrate on other, more important parts of the review than worrying about stupid things like what he watches and what not?
I have never found Anand's ideology to be wrong, so even if he does watch CNN - I don't think it matters. Stupid people, stupid comments...
scott967 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
If you do this in the future, I would like to see a test of OTA ATSC reception for tuners. It seems to be a common problem with getting consistently good reception of the UHF band signal most broadcasters are assigned.Also, I found use of the terms "SD" and "HD" confusing. I have both NTSC and ATSC (8VSB) tuners, and the ATSC tuner receives either / both the SD format and HD format depending on the broadcaster. (The local FOX affiliate provides both feeds on different subchannels). ISTM that reception of the SD resolution is a little easier (fwerer dropouts) than the HD. I guess if you are talking cable, the SD/HD thing is not so confusing. At least on OTA, HD format can contain either SD material with pillars or HD, depending on what the network is providing.
gbrux - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Fine piece, Anand.However, the real excitement is high definition TV in the Windows XP Media Center Edtion 2005.
Last weekend, I watched on the Masters tournament in high definition from my local CBS station from my WMCE box. I have the ATI HDTV Wonder installed, and it has performed flawlessly sinced I installed it about four months ago.
I say, buy one of the cheaper standard TV tuners that you have reviewed, and buy the ATI HDTV Wonder (at about $150 some places) to build that WMCE box.
Incidentally, I'm going to put up a thread in the Forums with a step by step procedure for installing the ATI HDTV Wonder in a new WMCE box.
It'll be there in about an hour.
creathir - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
kjohnsonFoxNews all the way!
kjohnson - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Great review. But why watch CNN? I hope that is not an indication of your ideology.CigarSmokedByClinton - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Good review, but IMO this review without the 150MCE makes it almost worthless....The 150MCE is at least equivalent to the 250 but comes in at $65, the low end of the price range.
DigitalWarrior - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
Interesting article, but it doesn't consider the Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card which only costs about $65 from pcalchemy.com (http://www.pcalchemy.com/product_info.php/cPath/21...According to this article (http://www.htpcnews.com/main.php?id=pvr_150_1) , Hauppauge was able to reduce the cost of the PVR-150MCE by using a new A/D chip that could handle both the audio and video conversion functions with better image quality than the PVR-250.
I just built a HTPC using three of these PVR-150MCE tuner cards, and I couldn't be more pleased with them!
DigitalWarrior - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
ranger203 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
BTW, Great article Anand... Hard to find anyone that spends teh time to rate tv tuners. My MCE 2005 Box works great...ranger203 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
What, no PVR-150, or PVR-150MCE??? I can't tell the difference between the 150 & 250 models. And, everyone always likes price: $75 for teh MCE version...