Hi Firewire,
There are only two PCIe TV Tuners available in Australia, that I am aware of. The Digital Now card mentioned above, and the
LifeView PCIe X1 MST-T2A2.
The
LifeView PCIe X1 is Dual Digital / Dual Analogue card (effectively two hybrid tuners in one PCIe).
Various combinations up to four live video streams, can be used simultaneously outside of MCE (using
LifeView MVP software).
In MCE you can use either: single digital / single analogue / dual Digital / dual Analouge. As
Mysteron said above, it is an either/or situation with Analogue and Digital TV streams in MCE. If you have the option to use PCIe it would probably be a good investment, even if you don't want to use both tuners now, as it will give you room to expand your usage in the future. This does depend on how much you are willing to spend though!
This PCIe card is MCE Certified in DVB-T Digital, but not in Analogue. Analogue, even dual analogue does work in MCE, but it can be jerky, and recording can be a problem due to the increased demands placed on the CPU. To be totally MCE compliant in both Digital and Analogue the PCIe needs to have hardware encoding, in order to reduce the load on the CPU. They are available as
Dual Digital/Dual Analogue (2xHybrid tuners) as but they are expensive!
Edit: I am in the process of testing a single digital, single analogue (s-video & composite video), PCIe with hardware encoding at present... so far so good!
