DVICO Fusion HDTV Tuner Deals - PCI Card & USB

[Brad]

http://store.snapstream.com/tvtunercards-hdtv.html

 

All are $45 off the regular prices:

 

Lite PCI card, antenna & cable - $99

Gold PCI card, remote, antenna & cable - $149

USB adapter, remote, antenna & cable - $149

 

Works with MCE 2005 and BeyondTV 4.

[RossMAN]

Any idea if this works with MythTV or SageTV? No I haven't clicked the link yet

[mrn8]

Here's the specs on the gold package.

 

* HDTV(1920x1080i)/Analog TV reception card

* High resolution - crystal clear picture quality

* Enhanced reception rate with the latest 5th generation chipset from LG

* Supports digital cable (64/256 clear-QAM)*

* Supports HDTV Multi-lingual, Stereo, 5.1ch

* ATSC 18 formats compliant

* Crystal clear analog resolution with 10bit ADC

* Supports DivX, DVD, MPEG4 conversion from SD/HD stream with bundled software

 

Contents:

 

* FusionHDTV5 Gold Plus board

* Setup CD (driver and DVICO software)

* Manual

* Internal sound cable

* Remote control & receiver**

* External video and audio connection cables

 

* While Beyond TV 4 does not yet support clear-QAM, the included DVICO software does.

** Beyond TV 4 does not fully support the bundled DVICO remote control.

 

[Brad]

SageTV does: http://www.sagetv.com/requirements.html?sageSub=tv

 

Haven't found anything for MythTV yet, but I'd imagine it would work, but it might require some tweaking.

[Brad]

The main differences between the $99 Lite and $149 Gold versions is that the Gold includes a remote and has the ability to compress the HD signal into DivX/DVD formats, which may or may not be useful.

 

If you are using WinXP Media Center, that doesn't matter at all since MCE doesn't do any compressing anyway, and you'd probably want to use a regular MCE remote.

 

So basically if you are getting this to use with MCE, you are better off getting the Lite in most cases, but if you are going to use it with another software package, you might want the Gold version.

 

The USB version is good for laptops or machines with no free PCI slots (or no PCI slots altogether)

[schwoozer]

Any idea if this works with MythTV or SageTV?

Short answer: maybe

 

Long answer....

 

I hang out a ton at AVS Forum's HTPC subgroup, and from what I gather, this is currently a point of much debate. Do they work with Myth and Sage? Yes. Do they work reliably, with minimal fuss? Not unless you're lucky.

 

There are a few issues at work. First (and most important) is how you are planning to get your HDTV signal. If it's over the air (OTA) you have a better chance at getting it to work than if it's unencrypted QAM from cable. If it's encrypted QAM or satellite, these cards won't work at all (they're not meant to).

 

Next, mistakes in listing what is supported have been made before. These mistakes can be intentional or unintentional, but they do happen. As a result, it's probably a good idea to poke around the forums of whatever software you're planning to use. With HDTV still being relatively new technology, there are certainly bumps along the way. In all likelihood there will come a time when these work great and have easy setup. That time is probably not here yet.

 

This deal has actually been going on for several weeks now, and is actually not quite as good as advertised (that antenna can be had for around $20 at Amazon). Sorry I was sitting on this....I just never thought to post it here.

[Brad]

This deal has actually been going on for several weeks now, and is actually not quite as good as advertised (that antenna can be had for around $20 at Amazon). Sorry I was sitting on this....I just never thought to post it here.

You should have posted it :) We need more tech-related deals here on the forum. It's still a nice deal considering I paid about $200 for my Fusion "Lite" card about a year and it didn't even come with the antenna. Considering what OTA HD set top boxes cost, $99 for the lite version is a pretty good deal.

[schwoozer]

You should have posted it :) We need more tech-related deals here on the forum.

Well, now that I know there's a specific interest, I'll be sure to be more diligent about it in the future. I certainly stumble upon my fair share.