I'm helping my brother build out a hidef mythtv box for recording ATSC transmissions. I would appreciate any feedback people may have on a good ATSC card that has a good / sensitive tuner. Thanks!

Marc

Does it have to be a card? I like the HDHomeRun external box... two tuners for not all that much more than a single tuner card, plus since it's external you don't have driver conflicts or the card deciding it wants to be at /dev/video0 instead of /dev/video1 after a reboot.

It does not have to be a card, but he only needs 1 tuner and he wants to keep the price down. If I remember correctly, the HDhomerun is around $160. I was hoping to get him a good tuner for $30 - $60.

Marc

Hm, I think the cheapest tuner card at mythic.tv is the HD-5500 at $129.

There's that Hauppauge HVR-950 external tuner stick thing.... Radio Shack is selling it for $50, but I'm not sure about MythTV/KnoppMyth support. Don't know how well it works either.

The original Air2PC AirStar tuner is quite cheap on ebay, but it is not as sensitive as the newer cards. It works fine in a strong signal area with low multipath.

The pcHDTV hd-3000 is more sensitive and works well in lower signal areas and runs cooler. I have both the above cards and I prefer the HD3000. The air2PC card had been relegated to a testing machine. The air2PC card also runs quite hot.

I also recently got an HDHomerun (ver 2). It seems very sensitive and the reported signal stength is very high. It also has a signal quality meter (readable from a windows box on the network) which gives an indication of how bad the multipath is and is useful for orienting your antenna for minimum multipath.

Both the HD 3000 and HDHomerun receive all the digital signals in my area flawlessly.

The HD 3000 shows up on ebay occasionally and is getting near the high end of your price range.

My KWorld 110 is my most reliable card, and it was only $35 or something like that.
My PCHD3000 is prone to lockup if the signal drops too far. (program tries to record, but "file not found" when I play it back). If I fiddle with the antenna, for example, the machine needs a cold restart to get the card working again.

The Hauppauge HVR-950 is looking interesting -- Radio Shack has it on sale for $50. Not sure if it works "out of the box" on r5.5. I might give it a try.

Anyone know how good/reliable the ATSC tuner on the KWORLD 115 is?

Marc

I love my HDHomerun. It's certainly worth every penny! It's not exactly cheap but it's as close as you can get to "plug and play" with Myth. I now spend my time watching TV instead of "fixing" the TV.

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

I have three Kworld 115 cards. They have been working flawlessly for me so far. I got them at Newegg when they were selling them for about $35 a piece during a sale (It is back to $79.99 now). I am capturing OTA ATSC broadcasts with them (I verified before that QAM 256 works just as well).

Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback! I decided to try the HVR-950 and it seems to work well. It's on sale at Radio Shack for $50. I've posted the instructions for making it work at http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 096#115096

I've also created a wiki page at http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=HVR950HowTo

Marc

Good to know that the 950 works! Thanks for the follow-up.

Just a heads-up that after my initial post I found out that I could no longer get the SAA7134 driver to work on that machine. I've documented the issue -- not sure yet how to resolve it.

Marc