Low Cost TV Tuner Cards effects Mother Boards

[pnrkumar]

I've read many people suggesting low cost TV Tuner Cards from Tech-Com, Supercomp, frontech etc. But nobody mentioned any bad experiences with these low cost tv tuners. I'd like to share my experience with these tv tuners and would like to know anybody have any such issues.

My First Experience is with
Tech-com SSD-TV-670 Internal tv tuner card.

I've installed the same in my Intel Dual Core PC with Mercury Motherboard (Intel Chipset). Here TV Tuner to PC sound was not working. Though you get the sound if speaker cable is directly plugged into TV Tuner Card. But in that case I'm not able to record sound. Remote control was also not working. After few months I've got a serious problem. My system registry hive got corrupted. With TV Tuner card plugged in I was not able to install XP again. So I've shifted the tv tuner to another system

The second system was AMD Sempron based system with MSI motherboard. Here the board itself got a serious problem and I send the board to MSI Service center inorder to get it rectified.

The same TV Tuner card was installed on another machine with Intel Processor as well as Intel Motherboard. To my surprise. Both sound and remote control was working properly in this system.

My Second Experience was with Supercomp TV Tuner card SETV-106 with Philips chipset.

This card is installed to one of my customer. It's a Intel Processor as well as board. Here the sound was very low. Remote was working fine. After few months again the system registry hive got corrupted. With TV Tuner Card installed I was unable to install XP. So I've removed the card and installed Win XP without any issue.

With such bad experience now I'm afraid to install any internal tv tuner cards.
While I considered buying external cards but we cannot record or time shift features not available.

Please share your experiences and if you have any solutions please suggest me. Thanks in advance

 

[vwad]

I bought Pixelview Play TV Pro for 2k in December 2001. Till date it works like a charm. I am even able to make 768 X 576 sized TV Caps with it.

 

[sude]

hmmm.. i feel external TV tuner card is better.. atleast u neednot keep ur system running while you have transformed ur comp to an idiot box..

negatives: u cant record programs.
positives: minimises tv serial piracy.

SUDE

 

[salvachn]

My system registry hive got corrupted.

Why anyone would use Windows for a basic multimedia PC is still a mystery to me. There are better solutions available (that also work well with the el cheapo tuner cards) such as XBMC and Mythbuntu.