I'm beginning to realize that HD is like The Matrix. You don't really know high the resolution is until you see it for yourself.
Recently I found myself in the market for a new capture card, as my previous one had developed a rather bizarre habit of resetting every ten minutes. While tapping the input button on the front of it wasn't that big of a deal, restarting VLC after the sudden gap in the feed crashed it turned out to be an ordeal of hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del, ending the process, restarting it, and opening the card as a feed could take upwards of ten seconds, in which I could miss something important.
It so happened that I was also in the market for a decent FM tuner. Reluctant to get a USB-based tuner, I found an ExpressCard-based tuner: the AverTV Hybrid NanoExpress. It covers a variety of bands and formats, among which are analog NTSC and PAL, digital ATSC and QAM, and FM and DAB radio (though DAB isn't broadcast in this country). In addition to the coaxial interface, there's also a multi-in port for S-video and composite A/V.
In terms of software support, I'll admit that this card is terrible. My first instinct was to try VLC, which I'd been using for ages with the other capture card. It takes quite a bit of option-changing to get it to display any video at all, and even after an hour or two I hadn't managed to get it to output audio. At that, I was limited to analog TV - digital TV and FM radio appeared to be out of the question. VirtualDub could view and record analog TV with sound, complete with a fully-functional tuner, though digital TV and FM were still out. Vista's Media Center could handle both analog and digital TV, but not FM. Furthermore, Media Center only picked up one channel per ATSC carrier, though stations such as WGBX broadcast as many as four channels per carrier. Finally, I tried the included AVerTV software, which crashed whenever I tried to do a channel scan, instead forcing me to manually enter a frequency in MHz (not even a channel number) whenever I wanted to tune to something.
For kicks I downloaded the latest drivers from AVerMedia's website. The AVerTV app now works as expected, though nothing else was fixed. There's one remaining problem I'm having with digital video decoding that's of particular interest, mainly because I have no idea where to lay the blame. AVerTV uses an API known as DirectX Video Acceleration, which decodes video on the GPU rather than the CPU. On a machine such as mine, this is a very bad idea that leads to heavy frame skipping, seeing as I have a fairly good CPU coupled with a bottom-end graphics card. I could blame AVerMedia for not including an option to turn this feature off, HP for pairing a piss-poor GPU with a decent CPU, or Microsoft for not developing something that would automatically sense where video could be decoded faster and switch DXVA on or off as needed. I find it quite ironic that I can record live 1920x1080 feeds at 17Mbps MPEG-2 faster than I can watch them, then play them back with DXVA off in Windows Media Player with a perfect 30fps output.
For the time being, I'm ready to say that over-the-air ATSC feeds have surpassed Comcast Cable's QAM feeds. The first thing I watched in HD was the Opening Ceremony to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. I periodically passed the living room, which is wired for cable, to get a drink, and found that Comcast's digital 480i feed exhibited a rather huge amount of compression blocks, whereas NBC's ATSC feed was quite clear.
So how clear is clear? See for yourself.