EggXpert

I'm looking for a better TV tuner.  This has been bothering me for some time and I'm getting lost with ideas.  For a brief history, I had a TV tuner during 2002 and got a few screenshots, but it was extremely staticy (in the form of vertical lines rather than randomly spreaed) making it not really worthy.  Years later, I got a TV tuner from Newegg, but it had buggy drivers and a 280 millisecond lag making it impossible to play Super Monkey Ball 2 and most other games where precision is essential.  I RMA'ed it and got GameBridge, which worked very well for everything except my Sega Genesis and it doesn't have lag (about 30 milliseconds anyway, hardly noticed and within my limits).  It was bought from Newegg and after 15 months of use, it died and I got a replacement, also from Newegg.  I spent hours browsing product reviews (using Firefox's find feature to decuple the speed), and found that I needed to stick with something that used software encoding and found the "TV2000 XP Expert" to be promising.  It doesn't have lag (it's too short for me to determine) and it works with the Genesis.  However, it has audio-related problems (sound over long durations are out of sync (behind by 1 second every 5 hours) and its impossible to record from the microphone while keeping the game's sound (for live tutorial/commentary to help others with games)) and I have to set the program's priority in Windows Task Manager to "above normal" to get a better recording (I had to do this with GameBridge as well).  I also have to disable power-saving features in order to play my games on it (console games like the Playstation 1 or GameCube).  I record my gameplay for use with YouTube.

I'm looking for a TV tuner (preferrably on Newegg) that meets my needs.  Its primary purpose is for playing my console games on and recording my gameplay, sometimes with commentary recorded from my microphone.  In order of most important to least important, this is what I need:

1.  It must have support for NTSC analog.  Without this, the card is useless as there's no way I can hook up any of my console systems using the RF adapters.  I don't care if it has support for ATSC or not.

2.  It must work with Windows XP Pro SP2.  This shouldn't be much of a problem though.

3.  It must not have lag.  Through hours of browsing product reviews, I noticed that if the TV tuner has hardware encoding (as opposed to software), it's going to have lag.  The lag must not exceed 50 milliseconds or gameplay for games like Super Monkey Ball 2 becomes almost impossible and much more difficult.  As a consequence, it appears as if I have to have a software-based one instead.

4.  It must be USB 2.0-based or PCI-based.  I somewhat prefer it to be external.

5.  It must provide a way to be able to record from the microphone but keep the game sound track.  What would be awesome would be to record the game's sound track on the right channel (in mono) and that from the microphone on the left channel.

6.  It must work with the Sega Genesis.

7.  It must have AVI or MPEG recording (not MOV).  MPEG is quite common, particularly MPEG-2 so this isn't much of a big deal.

8.  It must cost under $150 (before shipping and taxes).  I prefer to avoid the "el cheapo" stuff.

Does anyone have suggestions for such a product?  I can still RMA my current TV tuner for a refund.  I don't know where to turn and I'm practically out of ideas.  Thanks for any assistance.

No Product Currently Exists that fits ALL your criteria. :D

Yay for way high customer expectations! 

I'm not after every aspect.  My current TV2000 XP Expert has some audio-related problems.  The audio, even with the volume maxed, is roughly 10 to 15 dB lower than what it should be and I have to use amplification of typically 12 dB to get it near what every audio file normally has it as.  I looked at the waveform, in Audacity, and it's far from the maximum and a 13.2 dB amplification was needed to max the volume with most of it being 20 dB below, far lower than it should be.  This TV tuner pretty much meets every one of my aspects except that of audio.

Is there a way I can select "microphone" as the recording device, but keep the sound from the games still playing?  When I choose "auxiliary", which is what is needed to get the sound track, it plays and records the game's sound track but doesn't take anything from the microphone (this is expected).  When I choose "microphone" as the recording device, I get the game's sound track just fine when playing, but as soon as I hit the record button, the game's sound is no longer present, even though I have "auxiliary" as the input.  As soon as I click the "stop" button, I can hear the game's sound track again.  I know for sure I can play a sound and record it as I've done this before.  In Winamp or something, I press the play button.  I open up Audacity, select "microphone" as the recording device (to mimic my intended method) and I record with Audacity for a few seconds.  I stop the recording and playback, and play the recording and it comes out just fine (somewhat distorted, but that's expected).  The difference in quality from the original with the recorded playback is not really noticed.  Afterall, this is what I did to record this video (on YouTube).  I'm using Virtual Dub to record (using screen capture), of which VD is recording from the microphone.  Audacity is playing audio files and my microphone is picking it up.  From this, I know it's possible to play sounds while recording them on the same system.  How do I do this with the TV2000 XP Expert TV Tuner?  Virtual Dub picks it up as well, but I have the same "cut out" problem.  I'd like to make some narrated walkthroughs and explanations of various things in my games and I need this in order to do so.

Edit:  I could have the game's audio track playing while recording with the microphone quite well with GameBridge when I had it but GameBridge doesn't work at all with the Sega Genesis although it works with the NES and Playstation 1 just fine (using the coaxial RF connector instead of the RCA cables).