I have to say, after moving up from a Connextant BT878 based SD TV tuner that was possibly 8-10 years old (???) that had the left audio channel fail, leaving me with monotone out of the right speaker to this beast, I am HEAVILY IMPRESSED.

First off, I've seen HDTV's before, but seeing it on my 22" 1680x1050 monitor, it's pretty sweet. In 16:9 mode it's at least DVD Quality. And all of this just using a simple "bow-tie" wire TV antenna.

The antenna (compared to using it for SDTV) is VERY directional for OTA HD broadcasts. Twisting the antenna like 5 degrees is the difference between picking up a channel and nothing at all.

However, this tuner works great with it's built in Arcsoft TotalMedia software. I've seen complaints about the TotalMedia software, but it works great for me (goes from 30fps to 60fps render by turning on Hardware Acceleration). Plus on my 2.77ghz C2D, it uses maybe 15% CPU max. Compared to DScaler, which used up 100% CPU time, it's relatively light weight.

Only downside is that it does take about 20s or so for the TotalMedia tuner app to start up (must be detecting hw or something). But, overall, for $65 on newegg, it was a cheap and inexpensive way to get HDTV on your PC w/ OTA broadcasts.

I haven't tried recording (or even know if this version of TotalMedia supports it, you may need the 'full version') and I've heard QAM (Digital Cable free HD broadcasts) are hit or miss depending on your OS (XP/XP MCE/Vista) and cable co. But for OTA ATSC, this thing r0x.

Here's a nice colorful OTA capture:



_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _