Sub $150 Duals: Which one?

[logifuse]

Originally Posted by juzdownunder

I'm reading here that a few people are using S4 hibernate to get around the issue of their TV tuner cards dropping out when resuming from sleep...I tried this, but my media centre won't wake up via the remote when in hibernate, making it pretty useless given my MC is in a cabinet behind glass....and i'm too lazy to open the door and turn it on via the power switch every time...

Is this normal for the Microsoft MC remote not to be able to wake up the PC from hibernate?

That's usually down to a BIOS or motherboard jumper allowing USB ports (sometimes specific USB ports - rear or headers) allowing wake from S4.

Justin

[logifuse]

Maybe DigitalNow are going to AverMedia?

http://www.avermedia.com/avertv/Prod...il.aspx?Id=450

Justin

[Dream]

Originally Posted by logifuse

Maybe DigitalNow are going to AverMedia?

http://www.avermedia.com/avertv/Prod...l.aspx?Id2=450

Justin

Maybe they are going back to this model that they had 3 years ago:

[logifuse]

And the Dual Hybrid S3 is...... a new K-World model! The PE315-2D. Astrotoy7 half stumbled on it the other day (when looking for drivers).





Looks like it still uses the saa7162 (like the S2 & Aver Duo Hybrid) instead of the saa7164 (HVR-2200).

There's a replacement to the Aver Duo on the way too.

Justin

[Ararat]

Sorry for the ignorance Justin, but could you explain to those of us who do not know, what saa7162 and saa7164 are? Are they something similar to a firmware revision, or more along the lines of more up to date hardware? Also, do you think the new Aver Duo use the saa7162 or the saa7164, and how significant an update will it be (I'm considering buying an Aver). Thanks

[logifuse]

Originally Posted by Ararat

Sorry for the ignorance Justin, but could you explain to those of us who do not know, what saa7162 and saa7164 are? Are they something similar to a firmware revision, or more along the lines of more up to date hardware? Also, do you think the new Aver Duo use the saa7162 or the saa7164, and how significant an update will it be (I'm considering buying an Aver). Thanks

They're the chipsets that the tuner cards are based on (actually, the demodulator chip, but we'll call it the chipset). You can get many different branded tuner cards/USB devices, but they're all based on a handful of chipsets.

The saa7162 was the first mainstream dual tuner PCIe chipset & accounts for most of the dual hybrid PCIe cards. The saa7164 is effectively an update of that (although it has hardware encoding included on the analogue side of the tuners), but has only been seen on the HVR-2200 so far (maybe the E900F Compro - not sure).

I haven't seen a decent close up photo or listed specs of the Aver Duo II (A188 is the model number), so I'm not sure what chipset it's using, but it doesn't seem to be the saa7162. The biggest problem with the existing Duo is that you really need to amplify the signal before you split it to input it (each tuner has its own connector), so despite being cheap, its a false economy. I have 2 in my office PC & use an amplified splitter to feed the 4 tuners. Also, the cards don't sit very well - I had to bend the brackets slightly so they locked in & were also seated correctly.

Justin

[Ararat]

Thanks Justin. Is the hw encoding the only difference between the 2 (not a big deal for me, more than enough cpu grunt to do it software)? Or is there a quality difference/other superiority.

Also I noticed that you use an amplified splitter. Do you know for a fact that this helps your reception? Because I have a 4-way splitter going to my currently 4 seperate tuners, and when I was at the antenna warehouse where my dad buys his satellite gear, I asked the guy who owned the place (and thus stood to make a profit out of selling me the stuff) if I would benefit from an amplified splitter, and he said probably not, cos it would just amplify the crap (hence why I'm interested in your view).

[logifuse]

Apart from the hardware encoding for analogue, it's hard to say. My HVR-2200 tuners are better than my Aver Duos, but that might be down to the design of the individual models/drivers. Anecdotally (my own experience & that of other users who have changed from saa7162

Amplifiers are only good for keeping the signal at a level, not for boosting it. A passive 4 way split (needed for 2 Aver Duos) causes a large drop in signal, so all the amplified splitter does is boost it by roughly the amount that the splitting drops it, so it's a zero result. Think of it this way, if an unamplified single point is fine to a single tuner, but is no good when split to multiple tuners, then an amplified splitter will probably help (to keep all splits at the single point level). If the single point isn't good enough, then the amplified splitter won't help.

Justin