Best Tuner for my Notebook?

Sasem's HDTV USB tuner box seems to be the only one of its kind available in the US market.

www.copperbox.com/lite/sasem.php

I haven't used this product, and don't know how well it works.

Buy it only if there is a "satisfaction guaranteed return" policy for full refund.

There are some cardbus capture cards based on the Philips saa7133/7134 capture chip with a companion solid state tuner IC that will grab 480i/576i analogue broadcast TV, FM stereo radio and NICAM stereo. No video hardware compression, though, that has to be done in software. The Aver cardbus is a pretty widely available example.

The major drawback, especially since you are already running a cardbus audio card, will be PCI interrupt latency (assuming you have two cardbus slots and can physically accomodate two "fat headed" type I cards). Your average laptop has a pretty crappy PCI subsystem design. Normally all of the PCI devices (cardbus cards are PCI devices) share a single interrupt. That usually means that all of the native PCI onboard hardware (audio, usb host controllers, IEEE-1394, onboard memory card readers, cardbus cards and the PCMCIA-cardbus bridge controller) share a single interrupt line. The reason being that fewer interrupt lines means more compact mainboard designs, less power and less cost. I think I am right in saying that none of the current mainstream laptop chipsets support intelligent APIC interrupt management - although I haven't played with a wide range of AMD64 designs, so they might.

The upshot of this is that (a) you have a tonne of interrupt greedy hardware (including a TV tuner card and audio card that both probably want to run as bus master) sharing a single interrupt line, (b) you are stuck with the same lame 15 synchronous interrupt line design that has been with us since the PC/AT was released in about 1987 or so, and (c) you have got a tonne of raw component video and audio to shift. Generally not a happy marriage, I am afraid.

If you go down the USB/Firewire things can be improved a bit if you can find hardware capture and compression in a box, because then you are only trying to shift a multiplexed, compressed MPEG2 audio/video stream across the PCI bus and the bandwidth requirements for that are getting close to an order of magnitude lower that pumping raw video and audio across the laptop PCI bus.

Don't expect miracles whichever way you go. It is tempting to think that laptops are just compact PC's, especially give the performance of some of the newest mobile CPUs, but from an architectural point of view they are really crippled in a few critical areas. Interrupts and PCI lines is one of them.

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Western european countries are mainly PAL with NICAM digital stereo audio in the british isles and scandinavia, and PAL with FM-FM analogue audio in most other places. The exception is France, which uses SECAM picture encoding and NICAM audio. Many former Soviet block countries and Russia also use SECAM. Standard definition DVB digital broadcasts are available in most places in Western Europe too. In most cases the *chipsets* used to do video capture will handle both NTSC and PAL/SECAM signals without a hitch. The restriction is normally the tuner module, which have traditionally not been multimode and are usually NTSC or PAL/SECAM specific (the channel frequencies, bandwidth and audio offsets are different). The advent of solid state IC based tuner modules is beginning to change this, but there are still a lot of old fashioned "tin can" tuners which are region and TV system specific. So if it doesn't explicitly say it can tune to PAL, it probably can't, even if it can theoretically recieve PAL, if you follow.

I don't have much practical experience with USB TV capture devices, I am afraid. Some of the first to market were essentially the same as their PCI counterparts with a USB adaptor chip for bridging the capture processor to the USB bus. I understand that there are some proper native USB capture chipsets now in the market too. I am very skeptical that a USB 1.1 connection has enough bandwidth for full resolution broadcast TV at sensible bit rates, so if have full USB 2.0 support on your laptop, that is where you should be going.

Good luck...

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ATSC = "Advanced Television System Committee" and denotes the North American terrestrial digital TV format.

QAM = "Quadrature Amplitude Modulation" and denotes the North American digital cable TV format.

Sounds like a purely north american only device to me, although I say that only on the basis of what is posted in this thread and not any first hand experience.

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