HP with tv tune or no tv tuner? Help me choose!

So i am thinking of getting an HP Pavilion DV6700T Series notebook. The only thing i am wondering about is the TV Tuner thing. What is it for other than watching your local tv channels?

 

The better ones will do both digital and analog tuning, HDTV and unencrypted digital cable (usually your local broadcast channels), and have composite and/or S-video inputs. I'm not sure what HP's does. As a rule I recommend buying an external USB HDTV tuner since tuner cards tend to run hot and you don't need yet another device dumping heat into the notebook chassis.

 

That's all i needed to hear. Thanks so much. Woo. I'm so excited, new computer. YAY! LOL

 

I bought a Pinnacle PCTV HD Ultimate Stick and I must say I am very impressed with it. It's an external USB device that acts as a TV Tuner to pull TV signals out of the air like the old school rabbit ears. The difference is it pulls both analog (NTSC) and HD signals (ATSC up to 1080i SDTV) and it also acts as a PVR (personal video recorder) so it has an internal flash memory card to store up to ~2 hours of recorded TV. One of the cool things about it is there isn't any software to install, on the device it has flash memory divided into 2 sections - The first section is a storage drive for recorded TV and the second section has all the software required to play/record TV on the laptop (read only so you cant format the 2nd driver partition on the stick).

The package included a mini-remote, A/V adapter cable (S-Video, Component and 3.5mm jack), a small ~10 inch USB cable (so you don't have to plug the stick directly into the USB port), high-gain antenna with attached magnet, coax input which also takes cable TV input (or VCR), and the software (CD's that match what is already stored on the stick's memory) to record in DiVX and MPG 1,2,4 formats. I've been able to rip my personal DVD's into an avi DiVX format so I don't have to drag around a bunch of original DVD's which take up a lot of space (a 2 hour DVD rips to about 800KB-1gb per movie to a portable DiVX quality which is about the same as analog cable TV, or 3gb in DiVX Home Theater Quality). Note - I own these DVD's and I'm not encouraging you to steal movies so lets not go there, also I did have to buy a RF modulator to convert the S-video & composite audio to a coax line to plug the Pinnacle stick into.

I tested the OTA (over the air) reception and I found a couple cool things. First you have to scan for channels and the cool thing here is you can tell it what to scan for (so if you only want to scan for HD channels you can do so without having to scan for analog as well). I live in a medium sized city and when I tested the OTA reception I was able to pick up around 8 HD local channels (and around 9 analog ones). Now bear in mind that during my tests I simply plugged in the antenna inside my house so no fancy antenna was used. The HD channels I got were of a very high quality and far surpassed my own cable TV signal which is analog (not that surprising but still very cool). The analog reception (both OTA and cable TV input) were ok but nothing to write home about, the signal was watchable for the most part but I wouldn't record off an analog signal because the quality hurts my eyes (fuzzy). You can use this device with digital HD cable if it is broadcasted in ClearQAM (unencrypted digital cable).

The next test I did was to open up Windows Media Center(WMC) and tested the TV Tuner in Vista Home Premium. Once again the device installed itself and even fetched the TV guide for the channels that were detected. To further test the device I told it to record a show from the TV Guide in WMC and it did it seamlessly.

I originally went to buy the Hauppauge HVR-950 but it was sold out so I went home and did more reading and ended up getting the Pinnacle because of the DiVX recording functions. The Hauppauge records in MPEG 2 and does not do DiVX. Anyway I have gone on enough about it, got questions? Just let me know.

-Reby

 

i have had both the analog and digital tuners from HP.

Both come with:
-driver cd
-MCE supported remote (the digital version has a few minor diffs)
-USB IR reader for the remote (the digital version is like 50% of the size). The reader comes with a sensor with a headphone-style plug which allows you to control set-top boxes.
-coax to minicoax cable
-some cable which connects to the card and converts to Red-White-Yellow rca in, and an svideo in

The digital version of the card comes with:
-a standalone antenna with suction cup on the bottom, which comes with its own integrated mini-coax cable



The standalone antenna with the digital card sucks for HDTV.

The Analog card works with XP. No tests with Vista, though.
The Digital card is said to work ONLY with Vista, but I tested it in both Vista and XP and it worked fine in both Media Center versions.

Both cards get RIDICULOUSLY hot after normal use.

Both cards are recognized as Hauppauge cards.
Both cards I cant figure out how to get working with Windows Media Encoder or VLC Player for streaming HDTV, only SDTV.
I think the digital card has QAM, not sure. My samsung lcd hdtv doesnt pick up any local HD chans over the cable, but the HP Digital tv tuner card picks up a few of them.

 

I've using the HP analog tuner with dv9000t for over a year. Yes it runs a bit hot, but no technical problem.

It is much more than just watching TV. Use it with MCE and it is a Tivo replacement, with live pause, digital program guide, auto series schedule. MCE doesn't support video editing or good compression like divx. You can edit videos using included sonic video software to remove commercials before burning to DVD-Video compatible disks.


I just got the dv9500t last week with the HP's PCI-express analog/ATSC tuner. The included mini-antenna is not bad -- and it is very small and compact. It picked up a few digital stations from my 10th floor apartment, and lots of FM radio stations (which you can also record). I can imagine using it in a city park like in the hp quickplay intructional video. It picked up 40 or so unencrypted digital stations using QAM from my cable provider -- about 6 of them HDTV (PBS,ABC,CBS,FOX,NBC,WB), sometimes even digital music stations. I can't find a way to manually add stations back when the digital station scan won't pick them up on subsequent scans. MCE does not seem to support digital tuner, only the analog tuner option shows up, so you have to watch digital TV using HP Quickplay software which has less features -- can't do anything else in quickplay while recording, no program guide, can't seem to delete recorded programs through the software -- have to use file explorer. dv9500t includes roxio instead of sonic which seems to be less friendly for video editing TV recordings.

I should add, I am in New York City on RCN cable.

 

The digital card definitely has QAM.

I was able to watch recorded HDTV shows using MPLAYERC with vista codec package 4.5.5. Unlike VLC, mplayerc reports video resolution. Have watched recorded HDTV of both 1280x720 and 1920x1080.

 

Ah, so i guess if two people can confirm digital over cable, then its probably QAM . I get only 10 chans...3xABC, 2xNBC, 3xPBS and 2xUnivision. The rest of the chans show 0 signal (2xCBS, 2xMyPHL, 5xNJN, 1xFOX, 3xPBS from allentown and delaware, 1xUPN, 6xindependent)

The card works fine with MCE-XP and MCE-Vista32. I tried it in both...

MCE will only add the XXX-1 channels. You just go into the TV settings and manual add the XXX-2, XXX-3, etc. channels. Works great.

I can record and watch HDTV from the card, yes, with MCE. I was talking about streaming live tv with Windows Media Encoder and VLC, both of which I cant get working with HDTV streaming, just SDTV.




Is there a way to scan the QAM using undefined presets like MCE uses? I want to scan every frequency...not just predefined ones.





Edit: btw, I checked out the Hauppauge driver INF and I see the following:
(hcw85bda.inf)
CX885.M7710 = "Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1500 (Model 77xxx, Hybrid ATSC)"
CX885.M7717 = "HP Digital/Analog TV Tuner"
CX885.M7790 = "Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1500 (Model 77xxx, Hybrid ATSC/QAM)"
CX885.M7797 = "HP Digital/Analog TV Tuner"

I was aware that the HP digital card was an HVR-1500, what I didn't know was that there were two versions of it. I have had two digital cards due to HP replacements and I noticed different revisions, the later of which was labeled as having new enhancements. I installed the driver and it saw my unit as the M7797, which means it has QAM. I guess the last digit 0 = Hauppauge OEM product, and 7 = HP labeled product. .

 

As to your streaming question: I googled a post where someone claimed success using Orb to stream hauppauge digital programming.

I don't think QAM is supported by Vista-MCE. The only "TV Signal" options I am given in MCE signal setup is Cable, Satellite or Digital Antenna. Digital Antenna channels are not compatible with QAM, in that QAM channels are numbers like 3310057, which seem to be of the form XXXYYYY, where XXX is main channel, YYYY is sub channel.

A note: Using HP Quickplay to watch QAM stations, I initially had audio sync problems recording HDTV and sometimes audio drop when quickly switching channels. I fixed the problem by turning off the "Time-Shifting" option.

 

I think it was probably my post over at either Orb forums, or MyP2P forums .

Yes that works, but for streaming to P2PTV services like SopCast and TVUPlayer, Orb is not very stable from my tests.


Yeah, Vista Media Center doesnt have QAM support.
I am using WinTV to watch QAM.

 

Te digital card does have qam