pdermody:
Thanks for the reply. I had to send my VB50HRTV for warrantee repairs. I think it dropped one to many times and something went wrong with the volume bar and/or sound circuitry. It was good that it did that now since the warrantee expires in 2 weeks.
I agree with you in that all the internal TV tuner cards have been a pain in the butt. I tried the ATI and there are issues with the software. I did pick up a MSI TV@nywhere with the new Conexant chip and it works pretty good. Color saturation and detail is definitely better than the VB50HRTV. The VB50HRTV picture was a little soft like the older ATI All in Wonder I have. But the nice feature is that it uses the same software that is for use on DVD playback on the HTPC. Same company that makes the WinDVD player Intervideo. And all for the cost of $100 CDN taxes in. All fit into the small package of my HTPC. It definitely was a pain to get it in that small case. It took a while.
Well the bad. The Remote still doesnt work. The person that sold me the item did mention it might not work. So I just have to come into the store and swap it till I find one working. Once I get the remote working I can use my learning remote from my Rotel and mimic all the commands so I again will use one remote. The TV software crashed once on XP today. Hopefully that was a one of thing. I'm not even going to try to do any PVR activities. I'm scared to even try it. Since all this is running on this HTPC it might be underpowered. VIA C3-933 cpu 512 DDR megs ram with a 20 gig notebook hard drive .. a slow 4200 rpm. There is a slight fuzz I guess coming from other components on the HTPC. But you will notice a nice picture with detail.
I might look into installing DScaler since it can be downloaded. But I am happy with the picture so far. So I might not even try tweaking and losing many hours which could be better used elsewhere.
ATI has alway have great hardware. I don't even know how they can employ or where they get those programmers at ATI here in Thornhill. I think they are hiring college graduates and pay them crappy money, promising crappy returns on stock options. There drivers and applications barely works. Your even better off using the drivers supplied drivers offered by the OS. At least those have gone through betas and updates.
I personally recommend any TV Tuner card using the Conexant chip. The video/audio decoder is excellent. To note it is a 10 bit video AD converter. The chip is a Silicon tuner & Conexant CX881 video/audio decoder.
