Anybody have an opinion for what the best TV tuner for a 7600 or 9600 PCI based Mac would be?
I've got an iXMicro TV Tuner that works ok, but not great. I think that virtually all the PCI card based TV tuners out there for Macs are based on the same hardware, just rebranded (or slightly modified). In my experience, the tuner really kind of stinks. You can watch TV alright, but pushing raw video over a 33MHz PCI bus ... Well, it's not pretty. And that doesn't include encoding and compressing it in real time while writing the compressed stream to disk. Don't bother with your PCI Mac, even if you've got a fast G3/4 upgrade in there. You'll need other hardware too, like a video capture card (ignore an internal TV tuner and just go this route with an external tuner) that supports hardware compression, and a FAST disk/controller.
The best on-screen quality is probably found in the ATI XClaim VR and XClaim TV (external pod) solution. It will capture to disk, and it has decent on-screen display (I think the video being input gets written directly to the frame buffer and bypasses the PCI bus and CPU - not true for other most PCI based solutions). I don't know about how configurable the software is, though - but I bet you could set a schedule to record certain programs. Also, I think it supports Motion JPEG-A hardware compresion...
Apple's own video capture hardware for the 5000/6000/7000/8000 series is pretty good, too. At least as far as on-screen quality is concerned. The TV tuner is only available on the 5000/6000 series, but it's pretty slick. The software isn't as configurable as ATI's, AFAIK, and I don't think it supports hardware compression without some sort of assist from a 3rd party capture card. Plus, with the 5000/6000 series, you can control the Mac, TV, FM radio (if installed also), CD playback, and overall volume with an IR remote control!! How cool is that?!
The best solution by far is to use an external box like the Formac Studio DVR. It will take analog video (or a TV-antenna type source) and convert it to a DV stream which is easily written to disk. Of course, you'll need FireWire, a big hard drive, and a beefier CPU than a 604(e) to do anything with the DV...
Peace, Drew --
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