Has anyone seen any evidence that HD freeview tuners for the UK are in development anywhere?

The Winter Hill transmitter starts broadcasting HD freeview this December but I've not seen any tuners yet that will take advantage of it.

I'm currently running a Compro E900F tuner and I'm predicting that I'll need more than just a software/firmware upgrade.

scouse_mouse

I'm currently running a Compro E900F tuner and I'm predicting that I'll need more than just a software/firmware upgrade.

What makes you think that? From the Compro Technology E900F Product page "Support SDTV, H.264 and 1080i HDTV (where available)" - what more could you want. Now December has rolled around, how is it going? I have an E900F and my area wont be going Digital until 2012 so I'm just using analog in the mean time. This card has the best picture quality/reception strength of the many I've used over the years so that and the fact the chip was designed in England gives me faith it should work well.

I do worry about some of the advice given out on this site. The Compro isn't DVB-T2 compatible so if he bought that specifically for Freeview HD he'd be wasting his money. There isn't a single tuner on the market that'll work with Freeview HD.

 Oli

Correct, so even though the Granada region is now fully digital and is broadcasting freeview HD ( as far as I'm aware) there aren't any TV's or PC expansion cards that can receive/decode the HD portion. More than just a software/firmware update, new hardware required most likely...

Thanks for the education that there are different types of HDTV - I never realised that there was both DVB-T and DVB-T2. What makes you think that the E900F won't be able to work with it (given the Philips chip on it was designed in the UK)? Has anyone any links to Compro Technologies' official position on this? Does the fact it does hardware MPEG-4 compression mean it will also handle DVB-T2? The Freeview page here mentions that support for MPEG-4 compression technology will be required but that's quite general.

It doesn't affect me for the moment but clearly if they've already said it won't support the DVB-T2 standard, it's a case of the product information page not providing all the information it should....

I just got an email from hauppauge that they intend a single tuner DVB-T2 device in time for the world cup

A single DVB-T2 tuner would be quite restrictive.  Did Hauppauge say if the planned card would include a DVB-T tuner as well ?

Never mind, I found an announcement on the Hauppauge UK forums which describes this as a USB device with just one DVB-T2 tuner (and apparently zero DVB-T tuners).  Although it's a big step forward, personally I need a dual DVB-T2 tuner PCIe card for my HTPC.

Some time ago I corresponded with Compro Technology about this and was advised a successor to the E900F with DVB-T2 support was being developed - no word on when it would be released however. It'd be worth emailing them about it.

Blackgold currently make this product http://shop.blackgold.tv/BGT3620 but I've no experience with them. Looks like it should do what you want on paper though.

[Edit: I've just noticed the date on the previous post was around a year ago - strange because I received an automated 'someone responded' email from this forum linking this thread this morning....]

Two years later, I see that TBS have now launched some Freeview HD tuner cards. .

TBS6220 - Single tuner at £77 TBS6220 PCI-E DVB-T2/T TV Tuner Card [TBS6220] - US$118.99 : BuyDVB Online Store

TBS6280 - Dual tuner at £103 TBS6280 PCI-E DVB-T2/T Dual Tuner Card [TBS6280] - US$158.99 : BuyDVB Online Store

Both are PCI-E cards , both work great with window media center. although I am trying to work out why the 6220 appears to have two antenna/aerial connectors, prehaps it has a passthrough. Anyway, this is a good news !