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i think i want to get one of these, so if anyone has any input, owns one, has suggestions, lets hear it. Since i'll be using a laptop i can't support a pci card, so it'll have to be USB or firewire or something. Older USB1 tuners seem to feature too much compression and i can't really find anything newer that's not a PCI card. There has to be something good out there that can work for me.
A couple of years ago, a PCMCIA tv tuner existed, but it sucked and the company no longer is around, I think.
There was one firewire tv tuner, but its mac only and I also think the company that made it is no longer around or supports it.
Your only option is USB tuners then. And of those, the most popular and widely supported seems to be the Hauppauge WinTV USB.
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Sure its not USB 2.0 and its gonna have compression, but there's few options in laptop tv.
ATI also makes a TV Wonder USB, but I didn't see many webshops carrying it, so ATI may have droppped support for it.
Better solution would be to have a desktop system with a tv tuner in it with Windows Media Encoder broadcasting a signal through a LAN connection. A 100mbps network connection would make for very high quality signal transfer. Though I doubt you have a desktop around to do such a thing.
Some laptops include tv in/out functions on their video cards. So another option could be to just hook a cheap VCR or cable box with a tv tuner in it to the laptop's s-video or composite input. Audio would require an RCA to line-in adapter, which can be found at Radio Shack pretty easily & cheaply.
I have the ATI USB tv tuner. It's okay, but not great. The main downfall is that it can only do 320x240 resolution, due to the limits of USB 1 technology. I have used the Hauppague tuner too, it works about the same.
One problem though, is that when you hook up stuff through the coax cable, the sound and video don't sync, I think it's because the tuner has to use the computer to process it. The Svideo in worked perfectly. I've never had that kind of issue with an internal card though.
Someone needs to release a USB 2.0 card with the quickness.
USB isn't fast enough. I had the PCI WinTV and it sucked pretty bad and I quickly got rid of it.