PCMCIA TV TUNER ! Whoooohoooo !

This is great!! How much is it? Have you found it available anywhere?

i'm interested 2

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...Search+Froogle

I think it would be about $100 to $140. But doesn't look at any store has it yet.

It sounds pretty good. There are some positive Google reviews, and this thread shows more pics.

http://www.tv-cards.com/messageboard...ic.php?p=27766

Even better, that price above is the Australian one. If it is $120 or so here, it should be well under $80 in the US.

I'm going to get one and will report back.

Steve

so can i get it here in the US?

i have this usb capture device, i forgot what it's called. could i use that with my laptop?

Finally PCMCIA is useful for modern notebooks.

Is it a hardware mpeg encoder, or does it tie up your machine crunching the video?

It's out of stock here, but hopefully in a couple of days.

Steve

lifeview.com also have a line of PCMCIA tuner coming out including a HDTV version.

If you hook up a playstation2 or an xbox to the tuner would there be any lag when playing games?

Yes. You can't convert analog to digital without one. I don't know how much of a delay, maybe the maker does.

I'd be curious on what the delay is too. The USB TV tuners are annoyning, since the USB bus really wasn't engineered to have real time video going over it like Firewire was. Sadly no PC maker takes Firewire seriously (proven by the lack of any notebooks with 6 pin connectors, etc...).

HDTVs don't have noticible delays on analog inputs, nor do PCs equipped with PCI tuner cards. I'm guessing this PC card won't have any noticible delay, but it may not use the slot to the full potential it could.

My notebook (m505x) has a 6 pin connector. But yes, there are only a few on the market.

Whats the latest on this, can we get it here in the US?

We're one of the lucky ones to have noth a 6 pin and 4 pin.

Okay, I picked it up today and have just spent the past few hours installing and playing with it. Price was $99 Australian, which is about $80 US. I got it from ww.i-tech.com.au.

First the negative. I installed it without problems into my Sony, then switched it to the Asus which runs SP2. It kept asking for an SP2 disk, so I said to hell with it and uninstalled SP2. After that there were no problems at all.

The card is light and moderately well made. It does get a little warm.

I tried the TV tuner first. All you have to do is hook up an antenna and press scan and it finds all your channels. My antenna reception sucks, but didn't suck any more with the AverTV. You can choose between antenna and cable tuners, but my cable is encrypted so I couldn't feed it straight into the card. The picture was very nice however.

Recording was simple, and on playback you get a nice PIP of what is on live. I didn't try time shifting. In Australia we have no electronic program guides, which is a bit of a bummer.

There are also S-Video and composite inputs, both of which worked as advertised, although the composite input needed to be seated just right or the picture would break up. The sound for the S-Video goes through the composite in, which is not explained in the manual. You cannot record copy-protected movies from an outboard DVD player, or at least I couldn't. I may keep trying though .

The software is very flexible interms of encoding options, you can have MPEG1, MPEG2, and AVI and choose a range of settings for these up to raw AVI, or even have audio only in MP3 or Wave at various settings.

I had no problems with any of these except for the AVI encoding, which had artifacts and stuttering. I may need to play with these a little more.

CPU load ranged from 20-30% when simply watching the video feed to 45% when recording and encoding.

All in all it is a pretty good little unit, especially for the price.

Any questions, let me know.

Cheers

Steve

I wonder when this will be available in the US
Thanks for the review!