Do TV tuner cars have a short lifespan?

I've got a Powercolor ATI 550 Tuner card - that I picked up for 25 bucks a while back.

The Picture has very much been above my expectaitons re: picture quality for the particular device - but today - I was having a little issue with the sound / picture bein kindof skippy. I changed the channel back and forth - and it fixed it for a while - and then started again - finally turned it off for the time being.

Is this normal for TV tuner cards - do they deteriorate over time - or maybe Powercolor is showing it's colors as a low end brand?

Anybody thoughts appreciated.

Thanks

None that I know of. My WinTV PVR150 (picked from an abaoned system back around 2005) is still works fine. However, I don't use the tuner, so I don't know if that could make a difference. I just use RCA most of the time.

Your card is not a bad card. All electronics deteriorate over time, but this may be an issue with something else. Are you recording anything when you watch TV via the card? Do you see any unusual spikes in CPU usage during these errors? If so, any particular process spiking?

I'll check for CPU spikes next time it happens - but I've got a core i7 - so don't think that would be causing the problem.

Since I first installed it - it would on rare occasion get quarky - and I'd shut down the app - and restart - and it worked fine. But for the most part - it's been a very reliable card.

I mainly use it to watch a TV on second monitor when I'm using my PC for another duty. Before it started acting up today - I did use it as a capture card for a Video Editing software. I haven't checked that stream yet - to see if it happened during that recording - or just afterwards.

Jamin43 said:

I'll check for CPU spikes next time it happens - but I've got a core i7 - so don't think that would be causing the problem.

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Sure thing. Let us know. Even with a core i7 you can have issues if you have something that is overloading your system (and thus taking power away from the TV tuner processes).

Looks like it was temporary glitch.

I had it going for 2 hours yesterday - and an hour today while I was doing some video editing from the file I captured yesterday - and the TV tuner played along side just fine.

I'll definitely check for spikes if the quark pops up again though. At the moment - everything is peachy again. :good:

could also be your actual cable signal

I occasionally, on regular TV, have spikes and corruption and stuff. Is your signal digital?

viper110110 said:

could also be your actual cable signal

I occasionally, on regular TV, have spikes and corruption and stuff. Is your signal digital?

Click to expand...

I got a digital cable box - putting out an Analog signal to an analog card. I have the Tuner card set at channel 3 - and control it though the cable box.

I've had weak signal sign message maybe 3 times since I got the card - and it's easily fixed by changing the channels and going back to channel 3.