Miso Soup Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 I'm looking to buy a external USB based TV Tuner, but am stuck choosing between two models: 1) A Buffalo brand TV tuner (Japanese), with TV, S-video and video inputs, but nothing much else 2) The same as 1, except with (what I would assume to be) hardware based filtering. The latter one has around five filters which will help clean up common image problems. The second one is almost double the price of the first one. I was wondering if there are any software filters that can be used to achieve a similar effect as hardware based ones. I kinda want to save some money here, if possible. What would you guys recommend? I've heard something about DScaler, but don't know if that will do the trick. Just some extra information: When I saw a demonstration, the filters on the second tv tuner was activated and deactivated using software. While I know this doesn't mean that the filtering if software based, I was surprised as I thought that it would be enabled by default. Also, I am in Japan, which means that I can't really read the software, but I would guess that the hardware should be similar everywhere? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KayMan2K Posted May 31, 2005 Share Posted May 31, 2005 DScalar is a very nice program that can clean up video quite well. However, read another post I made about USB based TV turners. They are usually not compatible with such software because they transfer the video to the computer as MPEG2.. which is lossy. Its hard to filter a bad MPEG2 stream to look good. Regardless, DScalar will not work with a USB-based tuner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miso Soup Posted June 1, 2005 Author Share Posted June 1, 2005 Thank you for your answer. So you would recommend buying the more expensive version with hardware based filtering? Also, does this mean that there is no way to use software based filters to improve the quality of mpeg2 recorded video? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_kane81 Posted June 8, 2005 Share Posted June 8, 2005 Always pick hardware oversoftware filtering - if you can afford it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts