A Good Choice for an Analog TV Tuner Card

I had a Fusion HDTV3 card, which worked pretty well, but I wanted to be able to record two shows at once so I started looking into buying an affordable second tuner card. HDTV cards are more expensive and it is very rare that I want to record two HDTV shows simultaneously so I limited the search to an analog card. The Fusion HDTV card uses software MPEG encoding which was using a significant portion of my processors resources. This really slowed things down when I was trying to use other programs while something was recording, so it was important for me to find a card with Hardware-based MPEG2 Encoding/Compression. Hardware encoding means the tuner card does all the processing so it doesn’t bog down your CPU and your recordings won’t skip if the CPU is overloaded. Hardware encoding increases the price a bit but seems worth it to me. At the time I had a AMD 2600 processor, I have since upgraded to a AMD X2 dual core 3800 processor; With the faster dual core processor the benefits of hardware encoding are less significant.
The PVR560 was the best priced tuner card, I found, which included Hardware Encoding. There weren’t any reviews about it so I decided to take a chance on it.
Installation is simple just plug it into an open PCI slot and hook up your cable or antennae. I never use the driver discs because there are usually updated versions that have been released since the driver disc was manufactured. Go to the manufacturer’s website and download the latest drivers. I also installed the BeyondTV trial version. Don’t bother with Beyond Media if you already have a decent media player on your PC.
There are reviews of BeyondTv here : http://www.epinions.com/Snapstream_Media_Beyond_TV_4 so I won’t go into to much detail on it. The Express version included with the card has some limitations on how far ahead you can view the guide-3 days vs. 2 weeks, you can’t tell it to always record a favorite show like you can in the full version and the commercial skipping and file resizing options are disabled. The BeyondTV software is very feature rich so it takes a while to get a handle on all the features and interfaces. I liked the program enough that I bought the full version. My PVR560 didn’t include the BeyondTV firefly remote, but I got it free when I upgraded to the full version of BeyondTV for $29. I have my TV hooked up to my video card output, and the remote control receiver hooked up in the room with the TV and Beyond TV allows me to do everything via remote just like using a TIVO or set top PVR.
If you have Windows Media Center it should control the PVR560 without any added software. Any Video capture software should recognize your PVR560. I tried it with Pinnacle Studio and Microsoft MovieMaker both of which were able to capture video from the card. The PVR 560 has a S-video input which can be used directly or through the included S-video to RCA composite video adapter to capture video from a VCR, camcorder, security camera or any other device with video output.
The card also has the ability to tune in FM radio stations using the supplied antennae, it seemed to pull in stations as well as my car radio but, I haven’t used this feature again since trying it out. The antennae plugs into the cable input so if you were to use the FM, and TV features regularly you would have to swap the connectors each time or buy a cable switch.
Please note, if you are using an antennae for TV signals this card will not be able to pick up Over-The-Air (OTA) signals after the February 2009 shut off date for analog OTA broadcasts. For cable viewers the FCC recently announced that cable carriers must continue to carry analog signals until 2012 so you still have plenty of time to use this card.