Which TV cards are good these days?

[Nowhere]

The case is that my friend is planning to buy some TV card (with radio, and Nicam would be good I guess) but he has no idea what to choose.
What do you recommend and why?

edit: Budget is about 60 €.

[J1NG]

Does it need capturing capability?

:: edit ::

That is, do you need to be able to capture anything from an external source too?

:: /edit ::

J1NG

[Nowhere]

No, it's for watching TV and listening to the radio only. (with the possibility to record tv transmission and nothing more than that)

[J1NG]

Well, from personal experience, if the hauppauge WinTV Primio PCI FM, or WinTV PCI isn't your take, you can try and get the leadtek multimedia card (TV 2000 XP Deluxe). Any one of these cards should be under 60 Euros (Well, here in the UK it should be anyway).

Other's may be able to recommend some better (cheaper) ones, since I don't know what's entirely available over at Poland.

J1NG

[Nowhere]

Mostly Pixelview and Avermedia only here, but we've found some Hercules and Leadtek cards too.

I've dug a little and have a question: is it true that because of de facto standard it is better to use card based on Brooktree 878? (or Connexant, which I guess it's the same, though 878a)
Or perhaos that was somewhat true for some reasons in the times of VxD drivers, and with WMD it's irrelevant now because any WMD tv card will happily work with any 3rd party WMD compatible application? (nob bloated 3rd party apps and drivers will be preferred, though it'd be gould if the ones from manufacturer would work good)

And forgot to mention that he's using winXP, of course.

[Flying dutchman]

I'd recommend the Terratec Cinergy 600. WDM based, Philips chipset, remote control, built-in FM tuner. Good picture quality. Only some minor issues when capturing AVI (may stop spontaneously on slower CPU's).

[Nowhere]

...and not available in Poland.

I think it's now Pixelview PlayTV HD or Leadtek Winfast TV 2000 XP Deluxe. Which one of these two?

[Marshmallowman]

Flyvideo 3000, quite cheap but uses the same capture/tuner chip as the cinergy. The philips chip, is said to have one of the best Tuners of all cheap capture cards.

It does nicam, and radio.

Flyvideo capture software is actually quite reasonable now, and the WDM capture allows you to use whatever you want for recording anyway.

Virtual vcr(free) is quite nice, and strangely enough the ATI multimedia centre 8.5(free) works a treat for mine (I have a ATI video card)

The remote is quite reasonable as well...for the money it can't be beat

[mungu]

leadtek 2000xp

I have the leadtek winfast 2000xp, and it basically just stopped working on me... kept telling me that it could not initiate the hardware stream or something like that, so i emailed them, and they told me that they dont support dual cpu systems

just something to keep in mind...

[matroxg200]

I replaced my old RRG with a video card based on the 878a (Conextant bought BT recently) and I have been happy since them.
I found it for 50 euro at an electronics fair and it's made by KWorld. It even has stereo audio (all 878a chipset have it), FMradio, a Philips tuner and a remote control
The bundled software is useless though and I replaced the original drivers with a tweaked copy:

http://www.iulabs.com/drv/index.shtml

but universal BT878 wdm drivers are available too:

http://btwincap.sourceforge.net/

I mainly use it to watch TV on the PC monitor with Dscaler (http://www.dscaler.org) which is impressive, much much more detail than my old RRG, with the same SVHS input from the satellite receiver.