USB Freeview tuners

fybar

Evening,

Looking to buy a USB Freeview tuner so I can watch TV on my laptop, which should come in handy during the world cup. Currenlty dithering between the Freecom DVB-T TV USB Stick at approx £35 and the Terratec Cinergy Hybrid T which is about £70. The terratec has the benefit of being able to receive analogue TV as well as Freeview.

Has anyone any recommendations.

J

littleange

What spec is your laptop?

Browntoa

this one is £30

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info-pc.asp?id=6109&pc=froogle

MSI Megasky 580 USB TV Tuner

fybar

Centino 1.7 ghz processor
half a gig RAM
Win XP SP2

fybar

Browntoa, have you used the MSI Megasky. The review I read wasn't too flattering

Browntoa

no, afraid not...just see it the other day

littleange

The Terratec Cinergy Hybrid T looks better and it comes with Cyberlink PowerCinema 4. But the minimum spec says:

Intel Pentium 4/AMD Athlon XP/Centrino-certified CPU - 2GHz or higher.

Alternatively you could try one with hardware MPEG encoding like the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-USB2 but this is bigger in size to carry around and probably be more £s but is more likely to work.

This says: Hardware MPEG-2 encoder, so you only need from 1-2 Gigabytes of disk space per hour of recorded video. While recording, the WinTV-PVRs' hardware MPEG encoder does all the work, so your PC continues to run at full speed!

System requirements: Pentium® II processor 733MHz or faster, 128MB RAM and 10GB disk drive minimum recommended

PC World £81 if you reserve and collect might find cheaper if have a good look around.

fybar

Thanks Littleange. Not too concerned about the CPU speed. The clock speed on the Centrino looks slow but the chips memory management is better so on the whole they tend to be equivalent to much higher clock speed Athlon/Pentium4 chips. I think Terratec are being lazy when they specify minimum specs in the manner they have.

littleange

No problem.

We tried the freecom and weren't too impressed with it, took it back and got the Hauppauge Nova-T USB2 but this is much bigger than the freecom.

Let me know how you get on with the Terratec if you go for that one