I’m currently in the process of evaluating HDTV tuners to be included into my MCE system that I built earlier in the year. Let me just say that it’s been a long road thus far. I’ve tried three different tuners and every single one of them has an issue or two. Fortunately the current tuner that I purchased appears to be the most promising solution to date. Thus far, I’ve tried:

• KWorld ATSC-110 PCI HDTV tuner – bleh.. reception was horrible and playback was constantly stuttering
• ATI HDTV Wonder – better reception than the KWorld but still suffering from stuttering playback
• FusionHDTV 5 PCI card – great reception and solid playback but the card is picky about where it sits on the motherboard. Drivers don’t always play nice with other drivers unfortunately

I’ll do a writeup shortly on the whole HDTV on MCE experience but I’ll say this much. I’ve had to reinstall the entire MCE 2005 OS quite a few times as a result of all of this experimentation. *sigh* Nothing is ever so simple I suppose.

Oh and in case you were wondering where I got the FusionHDTV card from – I dropped by DigitalConnections down in Huntington Beach and picked up the card directly from them. Here’s the link to the card on their site.

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