Hi!

Which tuner card do recommend?

I'm not sure I do, yet.

http://greyghost.mooo.com/tv3way/ was my look at one tuner and some
different software packages.

*I would like to find one with onboard decoding, not dependent on
the host CPU, that has well written drivers (directshow).

For *analog* TV capture-to-video Hauppauge had a couple of different
solutions. The WinTV HVR-1600 mentioned in the review linked to above
has an onboard MPEG2 encoder as part of its Conexant chipset.

But for digital/ATSC, the process is done entirely in software running
on the host CPU. Software that, for no particularly good reason, could
sap a Pentium 4 531 CPU in a Dell OptiPlex 210L PC.

I think it's a question of efficiency somewhere--and I also think that
one of the Digital TV converter box SoCs could be used on these cards
to shuffle the burden away from the main system CPU.

Just recently, I gave an ATI TV Wonder HD650 a spin, thinking that it
might work better than the Hauppauge card. Getting it installed was an
incredible job. Even the latest version of ATI Setup didn't work at
all. It would constantly drop the machine into a Parity Error
bluescreen!

I'm not the only one who has seen this show up as per some searching
that I did on the subject. You'd think anything serious enough to drop
a working machine into a memory parity error (when the memory is
definitely good and of the right spec) would be glaringly obvious to
these people. I guess not.

I finally did the setup myself, by using the Windows Device Manager to
install the drivers. And with a little prodding, I got the ATI
MultiMedia center installer to pop outside of the multi-installer set
that ATI runs through as they set their software up. This worked
around the parity error problems. The video quality isn't nearly as
good as the Hauppauge card offered. It does seem like *maybe* it
doesn't load the CPU as heavily.

ATI uses their own TV Wonder IC on the TV Wonder HD650 board. It's not
well documented like the Conexant part used by Hauppauge, so what all
it has onboard is a mystery. However, the board very clearly sports a
RAM chip, so I suspect that the ATI IC has some sort of integrated
processor core and quite possibly an MPEG encoder of some sort. But
where it works and when it is used is something I do not yet know.

In the end, a Zenith DTT-901 converter box hooked up to my old ATI TV
Wonder PCI board has worked the best of anything so far when it came
to watching ATSC digital TV on a computer.

William