usb tv tuner and dish
- Thread starter Teehar
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There is no ATSC or QAM output from a Dish receiver, so you're looking at standard def NTSC capture out the s-video, composite, or modulated RF output in descending order of quality. I don't think a component USB tuner exists, but I may be wrong on that.
The are USB 2 HD capture devices with component inputs. Hauppauge and Avermedia each make one. There are others as I recall. That would be the only way to get Dish HD content over to a PC. The devices also have S-Vid and composite inputs for SD content.
Great! I stand corrected on the USB HD capture devices.
In case they're too expensive for Teehar, I have one solution working here that's pretty darn good for SD: a Hava Platinum HD. It actually downscales HD to DVD quality SD, and does an admirable job of it. For recording, I just use the PC client that came with it to capture over Ethernet what is in fact a plain vanilla 720X480 mpeg-2 program stream. Works great.
In case they're too expensive for Teehar, I have one solution working here that's pretty darn good for SD: a Hava Platinum HD. It actually downscales HD to DVD quality SD, and does an admirable job of it. For recording, I just use the PC client that came with it to capture over Ethernet what is in fact a plain vanilla 720X480 mpeg-2 program stream. Works great.
Depends on what you're doing and what hardware you have. Most tuner cards are set up to look for an NTSC, ATSC, or QAM signal through the coax port. Direct input is usually through S-Vid, composite or component.
The bigger question is could you be happy with the result?
Computerly devices are typically merciless about how they present SD video. They usually don't go to nearly the trouble to provide careful scaling and smoothing that even the cheapest TVs do.
As time goes on, NTSC support in these tuners will likely disappear if it isn't already.
Well what I was thinking was being able to use the tuner with a laptop for signal tuning.
You probably can, but the question of quality remains. You could drive a car with no seats or windows but it would be far from ideal in the long term.
