INTERACT FORUM

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1]   Go Down

Author Topic: Digital Now QUAD DVB-T Tuner card  (Read 3077 times)

imugli

  • MC Beta Team
  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 1598
Digital Now QUAD DVB-T Tuner card
« on: August 06, 2011, 07:30:53 pm »

4 Tuners, 1 aerial input.

http://www.digitalnow.com.au/product_pages/Quad.html

A couple of these with proper place shifting and you'd be set... 

csy

  • Junior Woodchuck
  • **
  • Posts: 60
Re: Digital Now QUAD DVB-T Tuner card
« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2012, 02:02:04 am »

I'm running one of these with JRiver and it works well.  One of the really good features of this card is the very low heat dissipation - excellent for those who are wanting quiet/passive cooled cases.
Logged

Z0001

  • Citizen of the Universe
  • *****
  • Posts: 541
Re: Digital Now QUAD DVB-T Tuner card
« Reply #2 on: March 09, 2012, 12:11:09 am »

I'd be interested to hear experiences with this tuner. I've had one for a while and never been able to get glitch free playback ,sometimes it's an audio/video sync issue, sometimes the quality of the image is poor. I'm in the Eastern suburbs of Sydney so my signal strength should not need tinkering with and I have relatively new external roof aerial (the coax is 2-way split to the Quad tuner and the set top box/HDTV).  Also the pc is more than powerful enough.

Any experiences on what people have done to get this tuner to work as well as set top box or the TV's own tuners would be really appreciated!
Logged

csy

  • Junior Woodchuck
  • **
  • Posts: 60
Re: Digital Now QUAD DVB-T Tuner card
« Reply #3 on: March 09, 2012, 09:19:59 pm »

From my experience the card is sensitive to input signal level - too low or too high level causes occasional pixelation or worst case picture freezeing.  I have a 4-way RF splitter off the aerial and had to install a masthead amp which ended-up with too high signal hitting the tuner card and had to install a 3dB attenuator to stop pixelation.

Edit: I should mention the too low/high signal level issue is fairly generic, as I've owned a number of computer tuner cards over the years (Hauppauge PVR150 & HVR2200, ATI 550, DigitalNow Dual-Hybrid S2 & QUAD DVBT) and they are all sensitive to too low signal or too high/overload signal, compared to normal consumer electronics like TV's and DVR's.

Digital tuners have no effect on the quality of the image, they transparently pass the digital 'ones' and 'zeros' to the decoder.  In my experience audio/video sync issues are caused either by the broadcaster (seen a lot here in NZ with live news broadcasts) or caused by the decoder/renderer trains.

Edit: I forgot to mention that another common cause of audio/video sync issues is TV's themselves.  Their video processing engines can cause varying delay in getting the image onto the screen.  My Samsung 'C' generation 6200 was really bad at causing variable video delay on the HDMI input when I first used it, but then I discovered that these modern TV's have a 'game mode' which is low-latency processing mode (it knocks-out several processing intensive features).  As it turns out, Samsung TV's are well known for having high latency, but what took me by surprise was the variable nature of the latency and the severity (up to 1 second delayed from the audio).  Now using game mode, all my audio/video sync issues have disappeared (bar from the broadcaster of course).
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up