TV Tuner
February 26, 2009 – 10:07 pmI’m not an avid TV fan, but sometimes, TV can be quite entertaining. Especially when you want to watch documentaries (Mythbusters! and other Discovery Channel stuff) and old movies - which are hard to find online. I don’t include those crowd favorites here (like Heroes, 24, etc), because if you’re in USA, you can just about catch them anywhere online, and in quite good quality too.
So after a lot of debating, I went ahead and spent about 70 bucks on this little piece.
I wanted to get the Elgato Eyetv, but truth be told, it was awfully expensive. So I settled for this Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 950Q, which according to extensive research online seemed to be similar to Eyetv hardware-wise. It took me a while to get the software working, but at last, it didn’t let me down. It isn’t all that great quality - I never expected much from the direct cable-in from the wall (yes, my dorm has the coaxial cable thing jutting out of the wall. But they block some channels… I think).
Was 70 bucks (plus another 10 for the coax cable) worth it? Time will tell. Right now, it’s kinda hard to say. When good movies that have always evaded me online come to some channels, it’d be worth it. The only bad thing is that, being just one tuner, I can’t watch tv and record it at the same time.
Oh, and if I go on recording like crazy, I’d have to buy a hard drive, which will definitely cost quite a bit more. But the 1TB ones seemed to have dropped in price, going below $100 regularly, whereas just a couple of months ago you’d be hard pressed to find one under $100.