Top 5 External Tuner Options

Whether you’re building a portable laptop DVR or constructing a tiny Mac Mini DVR, there are times when you just can’t fit a PCI TV Tuner into your HTPC. Not to worry, there are a plethora of options when your tuner must lay outside your DVR.

Simple Sticks

Hauppauge HVR-950q

From venerable tuner manufacturer Hauppauge comes the HVR-950. As a hybrid recorder, the HVR-950 can record both digital and analog signals. This means you can record in HD using an antenna or through your cable. Digital HD over cable is called QAM and must be where the ‘q’ in 950q comes from. Note: don’t bother with the HVR-850 as it cannot record QAM digital cable. The HVr-950q tuner connects through a standard USB 2.0 port and is compatible with Media Center, BeyondTV, and SageTV (as with most tuners, you want to ditch the included software pretty quickly). Although it appears to be PC only, the HVR-950q works perfectly fine on a Mac. Available through Amazon for about $70.

Hauppauge HVR-1500

If your laptop has an Express Card/54 slot, the HVR-1500 offers the same features as the USB based HVR-950q: single tuner, over the air HD and digital cable HD, and compatibility with the major media center programs. Like the 950q, the 1500 does not include any external hardware support for encoding MPEG-2. This means that your CPU will be handling all the encoding of your shows. Depending on your processor and the number of tuner cards you have running, this may or may not make a difference. Available from Amazon for about $100.

External Boxes

Hauppauge HVR-1950

The HVR-1950 improves upon the 950q and 1500 by including hardware MPEG-2 encoder. While this makes it more powerful than the other offerings, the 1950 does sacrifice portability. If you’re hooking it up to a Mac Mini or another stationary HTPC, this may not matter although two or three of these will certainly start taking up some space (like its smaller brothers, the HVR-1950 has only one tuner). Available from Amazon for about $125.

Hauppauge HD PVR

The holy grail of tuners, the HD PVR is the currently the only way to record ANY HD channel on your homemade DVR. The HD PVR hooks in directly to your cable box via component cables and then plugs into your computer via USB. This means that you can get HBO, Bravo, and the Food Network on your DVR in HD. The cons: only one tuner, pricey, requires a separate cable box for each HD PVR you decide to hook up. If you’ve gotta have every HD option, this external box is your only option. Geektonic has much more info (and an unboxing) on the HD-PVR. Available at Amazon for around $200.

Silicon Dust HD Homerun

The HD Homerun offers what none of the other external devices can: dual tuners. This one box can record two shows at once. Further, the Homerun connects through your network rather than a USB cable. The benefit of this is that you can easily share the Homerun amongst all of the computers on your network. Unlike the HD PVR, you are restricted to QAM HD (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and The CW). Available on Amazon for about $170