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TV Tuners For The PC: Internal Or External
~*77*~ writes "TV tuners are gaining popularity for simple TV watching on your home PC, as well providing capturing capabilities intended to rival Tivo style devices. BigBruin.Com has new reviews taking a look at two TV tuners in the $50 range... An internal, PCI device from Leadtek... And an external, USB 2.0 device from Transcend... Head to head testing decide whether either is worth your time or money."
The only way to go is the ATI All-In-Wonder. FOr the little bit extra you pay, the feature set you get is unmatched.
When placed external, you can take the device with you. Very handy for non-computer experts.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Get yourself a DVB card, the quality is much better and recording is a lot less trouble.
With analog tv tuner cards you need to encode everything while with a DVB card you can just capture an mpeg stream - a lot less can go wrong and you can always cap full resolution without having to worry about the speed of your cpu or harddisk.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Well, when lcd TVs break into the general market and everybody has one, you can forget a normal TV and just use your computer with TV tuner hooked up to an lcd TV/monitor
They're nice for someone with no space for a TV set who already has a nice computer setup. For instance, someone moving into a dorm.
Think TiVo.
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Space... As I have lived in many small singles and doubles over my tenure in college I can say that having a tv tuner card has provided me with a lot of extra space. Plus it is also to be able to do things online and watch tv all at the same time. With a separate TV you would ordinarily have to look away from the computer screen to see what is happening on TV, unless you had your TV sitting right next to your computer.
Go Illini!!!
"Camping" means "Don't have access to cable TV".
Call it a boundary condition.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
is that, as far as I know(please correct me if I am wrong), you really can't play consoles on it since the cards have a 1.5 second or so delay from when the video comes in to when you see it. Obviously this is fine for television, but not so hot for gaming.
I am a college student who will easily move 2-3 times in the next 2 years, so I really would prefer not to have a seperate TV(the G5 weighs enough as it is). I love the gamecube because it is easy to get a bunch of friends together to sit around drinking playing Mario Kart or Super Monkey Ball or Mario Party(yeah I know, they are childish, but still a hell of a lot of fun). Somewhat harder to do that with PC games.
While I am delaying my purchase of a monitor till the WWDC(Apple is supposedly going to release new, cheaper monitors. I'm holding off on buying a G5 till i see what they have, the student developer discount makes them affordable), it seems that I will buy an LCD monitor/tv combo. You can't record with them, but you can plug your gamecube in fine.
Yeah yeah yeah. There is a horror story out there for every piece of hardware/software. Just because it didn't work for you doesn't mean it's crap.
After all analog is on the way out and HDTV is on the way in.
Virtually all of the Analog tuners work just fine. Not necessarily great, but fine. The only recent issue with analog tuners being whether they are XP-MCE compatible.
HDTV is where the action is. And whole there are various OTA and DBS solutions, the "Holy Grail" of PC HDTV Tuners appears to be QAM tuning so they can work on digital cable.
Several manufacturers are trying and none are succeeding, mainly because they either do not have the correct HDTV Tuner chipsets (mfrs. won't sell to them), or they have the right chipsets but they do not have the right SDKs and have to reverse-engineer them to make the tuners function.
Odd considering that several TV makers have introduced DigitalCableReady HDTVs with CableCARD slots yet the PC Tuner makers can't get basic QAM tuning to work.
HDTV tuners on PCs ought to be the discussion here. Analog has been mature for several years.
My SAA-based card from Medion works a treat. grab the drivers from bytesex and take your pick from the viewers. Recommended, tvtime.
Look. These are NOT called TV Tuners. They are Capture Cards that have a TV Tuner in them. There are Capture cards without TV Tuners, so what do you call those? Single-Line in Not Tuners?
I would think that the tech minded people of this site would be a little better then that. This whole article makes me feel like I'm dealing with people that don't know anything about the tech they are talking about.
Not to mention the links in the articles didn't survive a simple slashdotting.
Okay, now that I got the rant out, here's what I've dealt with:
I own a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-PCI card. for the most part, it sucks. it's not there mass produced card (the one with the 250 in the name is), so I have to use the software they provide with the drivers they provide because 3rd party software won't work with there drivers. Well, they programs capture like shit. Video is fine, audio is real, real bad.
Luckly someone provides 3rd party drivers for that card and a whole slew of other cards. The drivers are tricky to set up, but i'm sure most people here (cept the posers and they guy who wrote and submitted this article) should be able to figure it out.
I also used a Ati All in wonder card (9600 varity), it's not too bad at all, actually. Didn't get to test out it's recording capabilities though (it wasn't my card), but I really like it's software.
I would personally probably buy an external one next time, because of the portability.
But what I would actually rather have would be an external Capture device that had build in harddrive and networking capabilities (prefer line, but wireless might be okay). Possibly a
Tivo like device that has network capabilities. Being able to manipulate what I recorded so I can archive it in whatever formats I want is necessary.
that's my little rant, I hope. sorry if it offends, but next time don't be so stupid.
Be seeing you...
Another option for people who own newer video cards with VIVO or equivalent input, like most geforce fx cards, etc is to dig up or buy a cheap VCR to use as a cable tuner for their computer. The cable plug would go into the VCR, which has a built in tuner and then the RCA (or S-Video) outputs could go into the video card/ VIVO cable.
The advantages to this option are cost and ease of setup, assuming you have all of the drivers set up and working for you video card, all you have to do is connect the cable to the VCR and connect the VCR to the video input of your video card and also connect the VCR's audio output to your sound card line input. Also gives the added advantage of always having a VCR hooked up to your computer to make transferring video tapes to your computer quick and easy. For VCR's you can get a basic model that has stereo input/output new at walmart for about $40, or you can easily dig one up at a yard sale for a few bucks, maybe you even have on sitting in your house. Ebay is also an option, although shipping will often be about $15.
The primary disadvantage is that you do not have any control over the tuning through your computer. For most purposes, this means you would have to press a button on the remote or VCR, but it also means that you cannot do a full DVR setup, since your computer cannot choose what channel to record, it can only get what the VCR is currently set to.
In short, this could be a very economical option for people who just want to view TV on their computer and record single shows and already own a video card with RCA/s-video input. Setting this up could even be free for many people if they already have input on their video card and have a VCR sitting around.
~Chris
Break the mindless monotony!
I mean, knock yourself out, but I think we need to come up with another verb. To my mind, one of the prime virtues of "camping" is "low impact on my environment", which a 30' diesel powered truck with satellite TV is not.
Id agree, call it RV'ing or somthign like that. Sleeping in an oversized van with satellite TV and a gas powered oven is not camping. Its more akin to taking your own hotel room with you as you travel. Sure it could be fun, and a convenient way to travel and get away from work in the city. But its definatly not camping.