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If you've been eyeing Media Center PCs, but your current system still has some good years ahead of it, there's a relatively cheap and easy way to obtain TV and DVR functionality without replacing your PC. Take a peek inside your computer; do you see a free PCI slot? If so, you can add a TV tuner card; install the bundled software; and be watching, pausing, and recording fine television programming in no time. We review four TV tuner cards, plus one graphics card that offers a TV input.
Though the installation procedure is quite simple no matter which card you choose, using your PC as a DVR requires some compromises that you don't need to make with a set-top box like TiVo. First, your digital cable signal may look great right now, but when you send that digital signal to an analog TV tuner in your PC, the image quality undoubtedly will suffer. This discrepancy is especially noticeable on big displays. We looked at several TV tuner cards from different manufacturers, and the image quality from all of them was noticeably inferior to connecting a cable or satellite box directly to a TV.
Second, if you have access to high-definition cable signals, PC TV tuners can't handle them. The only HD signals you'll be able to pull in are over-the-air broadcasts, for which you need a big antenna and an HD-capable TV tuner card. That means no HD HBO or Discovery Channel, so for most, this is hardly worth the effort.
Lest we sound like naysayers on the whole TV tuner card question, there are many benefits to going this route. You can skip the subscription fees that TiVo-like services charge, archive content to DVD (a few select set-top boxes allow this, too), and choose from many software front-end interfaces, such as Windows Media Center Edition or Beyond TV. You can also play or display music, videos, or photos on your PC through the TV--perfect for putting up a slide show of vacation photos on the big screen.
The only card that stood out from the crowd in a significant way was the ATI TV Wonder Elite. The TV Wonder Elite uses ATI's Theater 550 Pro technology, a single-chip video-decoder and MPEG-encoder solution that delivers high-quality TV and DVD image quality. The card was the only one we reviewed to carry ISF certification from the Imaging Science Research Labs group, an organization that promotes high-quality standards in graphics and multimedia technology.
After image quality, the next consideration when choosing the right TV tuner card is the features it provides. FM radio or just TV inputs? How many TV tuners? What types of A/V connections does it offer? Does it include a remote control? What's the software bundle like? The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE and the ATI All-In-Wonder X800 XL include FM radio tuners, but radio performance was not a strong point for either card. The Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-550 is the only one in the bunch that features two tuners--a standard feature in set-top box DVRs, but hard to use in a PC because you'll need two source signals (that is, cable boxes). The Diamond XtremeTV PVR 550 included good extras, such as SnapStream's Beyond TV DVR and media management software and its excellent Firefly remote control.
If you're looking to replace your graphics card as well as add TV functionality to your PC, the All-In-Wonder X800 XL features the excellent midrange Radeon X800 XL GPU, along with 256MB of DDR graphics memory. It also has the most extensive set of external A/V connections, available via a dongle.
With these TV tuners, you have the choice of using either the bundled DVR software or Microsoft's Media Center OS, should you have a Media Center PC (some low-end Media Centers such as the eMachines T6524 ship without a TV tuner). Several of the cards we tested, however, exhibited difficulty working with Media Center because we didn't have an MPEG-2 decoder installed on our test system. Installing all of the software included with the card or DVD-playing software such as PowerDVD solves this problem. It's an issue that should crop up only for users building a system from scratch.
For more details on each of these five cards, read the reviews to find the card that's the best match for your system and your TV viewing and recording needs. For pure image quality, however, we recommend the ATI TV Wonder Elite.
Read the CNET editor's take
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