DVB - PC Cards What´s the best DVB-C Card?

[dream4ever]

Hi,

i want to buy DVB-C card for my PC.

What´s the best card?

Technotrend ?
Twinhan ?

or another?

And where I can find good software : colors1 ?

 

[witchy]

I like the Technotrend, plenty of support.

 

[JonMMM]

You really need to tell us what you are tring to acheive.

Do you want to use hard CAMs or Soft CAMs

Do you want to use it with MCE etc

 

[dream4ever]

Normally Softcam

I want Dreambox 500c clone on my PC : multi :

 

[JonMMM]

In that case vertually any card will do the job, wher it becomes difficult is when you are running either MCE, Vista or Hard CAMs.

Basically for MCE you will need a Hard Cam

Vista you will need the drivers and a Hard Cam to use the media center part.

Other than that from what I have seen its more down to the software rather than the hardware

 

[mike557]

Most important choice is either a full featured or a budget card. The difference is that decoding is done by the FF card as budget the decoding (of the mpeg) has to be done by the processor. If you want a low spec quiet machine the a FF is the best choice but the downside is that HD is probably not going to be possible on these cards because their chips are not designed for that type of decoding. However as many have FF cards there will probably be a hardware software combination to resolve this (not yet).
If you choose a budget card it is lower cost, always uses your processor so for HD you will need a pretty powerful beast
If have two Siemens/Fujitsu FF cards in one box and these have been excellent. They are however full length cards and therefore not suitable for putting into small media center type PC's. They are also like hens teeth now but if you have a standard pc then worth trying to get hold of.

HTH.
Mike

 

[charlieram]

The way i understand it, with DVB cards no decoding is done by the card at all as the received stream is mpeg 2 or H264 for certain channels. Either way it is just a carrier for the signal and your pc just shows the stream pretty much like a DVD

 

[nozzer]

Thats true for the budget cards. The high end cards have a built in Mpeg decoder and produce video with nothing but commands from the PC.

A high end card is as close as you are going to get to having an independant set top box inside your PC !

The low end cards though, can be far more flexible for certain applications as all data manipulation is done via PC software.

 

[charlieram]

A high end card is as close as you are going to get to having an independant set top box inside your PC !

.

So, a high end card cannot recevie/show HDTV unless it was built to do so (but will have a hardware driven TV out) Whereas a software DVB card will do hdtv on the cheap if your PC is equipped?

 

[Coolur]

I have the TwinhanDTV Cab-CI ( 2033 Mantis ) card and that works a treat, however I have not tried to use it in Windows Media Centre using softcam's but as it has a built in facility to take cam/card it should not be a problem...

Card cost me £55 plus vat and delivery...

Regards


Coolur
: colors1

 

[mike557]

So, a high end card cannot recevie/show HDTV unless it was built to do so (but will have a hardware driven TV out) Whereas a software DVB card will do hdtv on the cheap if your PC is equipped?

A high end (FF) card could receive/record an HD signal however you cant play it back via its built in decoder. In the future I would assume the process would be to hand HD decoding off to the processor and normal TV use the inbuilt decoder.

Either way if you want HD you will need a powerful processor as I dont think there are any HDTV FF cards.

HTH
Mike

 

[charlieram]

thanks, I have BBCHD (DVB-C mpeg2 and DVB-S h264) already, I just wanted to clarify the point about hardware DVB cards having TV out and not utilising the processor. I built my HTPC for HDTV and gaming, just need to find MCE clone that supports DVB-C paytv