Best HTPC TV tuner card / with encoding

OTA ATSC is already encoded (MPEG2) when transmitted by the TV Stations. The tuner card performs no encoding, just grabs the stream and writes it to the Hard Drive. What you choose to do with the recorded material (re-encode to XVID, h264) is done by software and has nothing to do with tuner cards.

You must be confused by analog capture cards. An analog signal is what needs to be encoded, digital signals have no such requirements.

Convert it to what? As I said, the stream is already encoded (mpeg2). If you don't want it in mpeg2 then it is up to you do convert it to something else. There are way too many other formats that can be used to expect a ATSC tuner card to do the conversion on the fly.

What software you need to use depends on what your ultimate goal is. It would be much easier if you stated what your goal is. Do you want to make SD DVDs, High Def DVDs (called AVCHD)? Do you want to convert for use on portable devices? There are too many options without knowing what you are trying to accomplish.

Basically you get an ATSC tuner card, you record tv shows on your hard drive (mpeg2 encoded) at their native resolution. You can leave them as they are or you could maybe convert them to h264 (the only reason to do this is to save some hard disk space). But converting to h264 will require CPU power and time, lots of time so be sure you really have a good reason to do it.

At worst you're looking at a little over 8 gb per hour. But some shows can run as low as 4 gb per hour if they were not recorded at full bitrate.

Some recording programs (SageTV is one) can be setup to automate the process of re-encoding. Honestly though, it is a major PITA.

-Suntan

As Suntan mentioned, a typical one hour of HD from OTA is between 6 to 7 GB. For example, tonight, my wife just recorded Idol (one hour), it came out to 6.5GB. Edit the commercials out and it will be down to about 4.3GB (about 42 minutes of video). Re-encoding it to h264 and maintaining quality, you can reduce it down to about 1.6GB per hour (about 1.2GB for a 42 minute show) but it will take anywhere from 8 to 12 hours depending on your CPU. Really not worth it with disk storage being so cheap.

I only use vista media center for all my recording and viewing. Vista media center was designed around mpeg2, it is its native codec (it has its own built in so you don't need to provide a third party mpeg2 codec like you have to with h264 and xvid). That's the format it uses when it does need to encode analog channels. Vista MC does NOT natively support h264 (window7 will) so you'll have more trouble with h264 encoded files then with mpeg2 encoded files. After all DVDs use mpeg2 and it has been around for many years so it has a very wide support.

Tuner cards only come with record and playback software. No editing capabilities.

VideoReDo is a capable MPEG video editor. There's a free trial available for downloading. Beware of using any MPEG editor. OTA digital TV programs can have 5.1 audio, and not all video editors can support 5.1 audio.

Regards

Offhand I recall that the video editors included in DVD burner packages (e.g. Nero, Ulead) could not handle AC3/5.1 audio.

Regards