[mythtv-users] a better tuner for SD

[Brett Kosinski]

>>> Interesting, I hadn't heard about this.  I have a pair of PVR-150's
>>> and have been pretty happy with them, overall.  What differences have
>>> you observed between the 150 and 250?
>>
>> I got some interference with my 150 and the audio seemed better on my
>> 350. Also, I often got the tinny audio problem on the 150 which never
>> happened on the 350. There were also lots of reports of bad
>> experiences with the 150 because they switched chipsets at some point.
>>
>> That said, I know that the power supply can greatly affect the quality
>> of the PVR-*50/500 (and probably many analog cards) as well as which
>> PCI slot it is in. Maybe advice to the OP should be to swap out for a
>> better power supply and see if that helps things.
>
> Remember the difference between the "tuner" and the "encoder". A PVR is
> both on one card.
>
> Using an external tuner, and going into the PVR as baseband (composite
> or S-Video), has been said to produce an improvement by some folks.
>
> The PVR tuners (and MANY different ones were used by Hauppauge) seem to
> be sensitive to input levels.
>
> The PVR encoder has a lot of tweaks which may help on that end of the
> equation:
>
> http://ivtvdriver.org/index.php/V4l2-ctl

Ahh, interesting... I've never actually used my PVR-150s as tuners,
instead feeding them with Svideo  from a pair of external settop
boxes.  That may explain why, in general, I've been pretty happy with
the audio and video quality I've gotten from them.

Brett.