TV tuner card selection

[Pafnoutios]

I am looking at purchasing a TV tuner card for my computer. I've found that I pretty much need to stick with the BT878 or SAA7130 chipset (the CX23880 isn't well supported yet). I would like an internal PCI card. Newegg.com has quite a selection of tuner cards, and they range in price from $30 to $175. Are these price differences justified? Is there something the expensive cards have that the cheaper ones don't (I did see one expensive card advertising a hardware mpeg2 encoder)? One of the $30 cards (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-144-306&depa=1) seems to have everything I want: TV, FM, S-video, composite, remote. Do I have to worry about crippled cards (like winmodems)?

[Icarus]

You could check the PVR hardware database (http://pvrhw.goldfish.org/tiki-pvrhwdb.php) which lists what people have running for things like MythTV, should give you a good idea of what you are looking for.

[Dracnor]

I have a Hauppage tv card, which cost about $50. The more expensive cards were still interoperable with Linux, but they have more processing power, and therefore the load shifts from your processor to the TV card itself. That's the real difference. BTW, I use TVTime, which works great. It was much easier to setup than WinTV.

[dboyer]

I use a ATI TV Wonder, and it works great.

[skubiszm]

I have a Pinnacle PCTV Pro and I am disappointed by it. Though the drivers are well supported, the quallity is terrible. The TV actually looks worse than if I plugged it straight into the TV. The card needs an audio pass cable which is kind of annoying. The worst is sometimes the video becomes out of sync with the audio and can't be fixed without rebooting the computer. I bought it because it was cheap, but I guess you get what you pay for. My next one will be a Hauppage card.