[mythtv] TV Card Experience

[Michael Libeskind]

I'm looking for some recommendations on a new TV card.  When I first started 
looking at building my own TIVO type machine I purchased an I/OMagic card 
which was a re-packaged pinnacle card with the composite input removed.  I 
thought the quality of the card was absolutely horrible.  I noticed some 
postings someplace where someone had recommended trying to improve the 
ground plane around the capture chip.  I tried this along with trying to 
improve the ground plane around the tuner itself and also tried adding extra 
bypass caps to the ADC chip and the tuner.  I didn't really see any 
difference in the quality.
After some research (admittedly now, probably not enough) I purchased an ATI 
All in wonder Radeon 7500.  The tuner was better, but certainly not as good 
as the tuner in a regular TV.  Also, I wasn't really happy with the TV out 
of the ATI card.  Text seemed very fuzzy and difficult to read.  I thought 
the TV out of my nvidia MX 200 to be far superior (it has a chrontel ch7007a 
chip on it) even though in order to fill up the entire TV screen I have to 
select an overscan mode that cuts off a bit of the text that MYTH displays.
Anyway, now I'm in the market for a new tunner card.  I am considering the 
ATI TV Wonder (not VE, I want streo) but was wondering what people thought 
of USB tv capture cards.  My thought was that it is difficult to get a good 
picture quality on an analog tuner with all the power supply and RF noise 
instead a PC case.  A USB tuner would isolate the tuner from this noise.  
Has anyone had any experience with these?  Will they work with MythTV?  Are 
there USB 2.0 versions out yet that have better capture quality than say the 
TV wonder USB (max capture = 6mbps).
Another thought I had was to make a really nice power supply filter - 
something say the size of a 5.25" drive bay which took the input of the 
power supply and filtered it through some really big power inductors and 
filter caps before going to the mother board.  I'm not sure if this would do 
anything since I don't know for sure how much power supply noise is a 
problem. (I could probably borrow some equipment from my office to take some 
measurements if anyone thinks this is something worht investigating)
What do you guys think?



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