TV Card - Recomendations

[SecretSquirrel]

Anyone out there using these cards ? are the pictures anygood/better than usual tv ?

I'm looking to replace my portable tv, so the card must have certain functions such as

 Recieve sky signal
 Convert signal to 5.1
 Remote control
 v.important - sleep timer.

I've found several cards can do 1st 3 but the sleep timer thing is more difficult.
I think i've found a card that does have it - Pinnacle Pctv-sat. But i dont know if its anygood.

Appreciate any help on this one.

[Stryker]

funny cos I been looking into them today.  The best I found was the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-350.

This one is not a satellite decoder tho but when I get one the sat box will simply be plugged into it.

Practicality is the name of the day and this is a very practical card.  It even has a remote control.  As I said play your sat box through this baby and you can pause the station!! it will automagically record the rest of the film/show while its paused... then after you 5min fag break when you press play on the remote it will play back whats its recorded thus far plus record the rest of the show.

It has all sorts of HARDEWARE MPEG encoding and decoding, it will really reduce the encoding times when ur ripping a DVD :-)

I was thinking of getting a decent DVD player.... bollocks to that, I'm getting a slimline desktop case for a pc with this card and a DVD ROM.  Then the Hauppauge will be the centre of my new surround sound 5 speaker media system for control of playing dvds, playing ripped videos and mp3s off my server, plus it has a radio station tuner AND I'll also have the nifty pause feature and auto record of regular tv and satellite....

NICE!

The cheapest I've seen the card is £115 + VAT at ebuyer.co.uk.

[SecretSquirrel]

Looking at specs on webby it looks pretty good. The one thing i'm unclear about - does it process tv/sat signals into 5.1 Dolby.

The spec mentions  :   dbx-TV stereo decoder (Nicam stereo on PAL models), for great TV sound. But what does this mean when receiving 5.1 signals from sky broadcasts ??

Where as the Win TV theartre does mention 5.1 output