Media Center PC, tuner recomendations?

EarthQuake

So i'm looking into building a media center pc, it seems like every tuner card on newegg has some terrible reviews, so i'm wondering if anyone here has any personal experiences/recomendations?

notman

It really depends on what you want to do. Some have FM tuners, and some are HD (which I assume you want). IMO, tuner cards still aren't at a good stage... and they should be by now.
Here the thing, and probably why you'll see negative reviews, it depends on the OS you'll be using and the hardware of the system. If you go to an HD level, you basically need a dual core system that adds up to at least 4GHz... and that's a minimum. Lots of ram helps too.
As for OS, determine now what system you want to use (Vista, XP Media Center, Linux), then research the driver support for the card you're interested in.

Personally, I tried a regular hauppauge and had a bitch of a time getting it to work on linux. I then got an ATI HD Wonder, and even though I had read people getting it to work in linux, I found out that it wasn't working in the latest versions of linux. Then I read further that it needed a dual core machine, and gave up on it (since I had a single core 1.7Ghz CPU).
Now, I have a Pinnacle HD Ultimate USB stick, and it works ok. Again, it seems to be processor restricted, but I can watch TV on it.. just not easily. I've tried it on a 3GHz machine and it gets very difficult to go through menu items or run other applications, because it's sucking the life out of the machine

EarthQuake

Well i'm looking at building a system with a dual core intel e5200, 4 gigs of ram, and a geforce 9400 HDCP ready/HDMI video card.

And i'm thinking i'll use XP MCE.


At some point here, im thinking it might be a better idea just to get a PS3. But i'de miss out on the TV tuner/PVR functionality...

[edit] A little more info;

What i want to do is cancel my digital cable, and use this box for an over-the-air HD PVR type setup, and as an internet box for hulu, netflix, downloading movies, etc.

sir-knight

I didn't think wireless is fast enough to stream HD content... I plan on getting some sort of HDPC box at some point.. I'm waiting for the nvidia ion to come out, it has an hdmi 9400 card built on the intel atom platform, it looked fairly capable of handling 1080p encode/decode with very low cpu cycles.