DigiTV PCI Freeview/Capture Card

**RaggoVibes** · 2nd March 2005

Hey, I'm thinking of getting the DigiTV PCI Freeview card, looks pretty nice and I've heard some good stuff about it. It allows u to watch freeview on your pc plus it captures straight to HD with no re-encoding (MPEG2). There's also a USB 2 version but it doesn't have an analoge input, although i've read that the analoge input isn't great quality wise, it's a nice bonus.

Here are some links:
http://www.nebula-electronics.com/
http://www.digitv-forum.co.uk/
http://www.videohelp.com/capturecard...reCardRead=270

Just wondering what u guys think. I've been meaning to get a freeview box with a HD, but I really want to capture on to PC. The DigiTV card seems to be the answer

**EvilBoB** · 2nd March 2005

A mate of mine bought one of these and swears by it. He said its easy enough to use and the quality is good but he's only watching on his PC monitor so I don't know about the quality when blown up to TV size.

**Porthos** · 3rd March 2005

Can it show analogue tv because my freeview signal isn't strong enough yet? Is it compatible with things like Media Center and Media Portal? Does it have a hardware encoder and decoder?

**RaggoVibes** · 10th March 2005

Received it the other day and installed it today.

First impressions are good, although I haven't delved very deep at all. I was suprised that it worked fine with my indoor aerial, although it's one of these flash ones with a booster etc. And i live London so i'm sure i'm not far from an aerial. Haven't tried capturing or anything else yet, very busy at the mo. If anyone's interested i'll let u know how it goes.

Porthos: it's not made for analogue tv... it's got analogue-in but it requires seperate audio i think, not 100% sure.
These drivers aren't compatible with Media Center although there are plans to develope them in the future.
Digital TV doesn't need to be encoded. I imagine there's an analogue encoder although i heard it aint great.

**Porthos** · 12th March 2005

Erm I think we've got crossed wires a bit. I'm saying with the aerial input it obviously already has can it display an analogue signal (ie just channels 1 to 5 on the old style analogue) as well as a digital one. Within that aerial is the data to display analogue channels, can the card display it though?

If you want to record live tv it will need to be encoded to a certain format and saved on the hard disk in realtime as I understand it. I think a hardware encoder will take care of this automatically and therefore take, say, 10% cpu usage as to potentially 80% for example if on a software encoder. I think that's right regardless of the TV you're watching being digital. You may be able to record the stream straight to hard disk as the raw data but I assume you would need probably I dunno like a 60 gig buffer at all times to play with and hmm I dno. Erm I've lost my flow. I'll stop.

**RaggoVibes** · 15th March 2005

Ok i think i get what you're saying,
The terrestrial channels are all available but they're transmitted digitially (along side the rest of the digital channels), so no it can't pick up the analogue signals. That's why i mentioned the analogue-in, although I aint tried it.

The digital stream is transmitted and received with MPEG-II compression. The PC doesn't need to do any more compressing. So a one-hour programme would take up around 1 to 1.5 GB in the original MPEG-II format.