TV Tuner Cards

Hi just wanting to know a bit more about TV tuner cards. If I get one, I can use my PC like a VCR right ? Is it that simple ?

well you do can stuff like tune in telly (duh obviously), record input sources (good for recording porn off saturn chilli if you are a pikey). some card have inbuilt FM tuners so you are able to tune in the radio


if using rabbit ears to tune in to the tell dont expect the quality to be that great unfortunately but its not too shabby, depends on where you live really.

What quality of picture can be expected if using a decent DVD player as a source through a TV Tuner card?

Whats the point of putting a DVD player through a tv tuner card? Just get a DVD drive.

If you want TV as well then you still gotta buy a tv tuner card, don't ya?

Get both.

they will do pretty good capture depending on the speed of your comp.

harvey - I assume that the quality will be unacceptable then?

That's the only reason I can think you would get both, which you could have just said in the first place......

A DVD rip will be digital the whole way through as it will read the DVD as data at whatever speed it can. When doing DV capture you have to wait for the DVD to play to capture each frame. IF your computer isnt fast enough your screwed. These days you canget a dvd reader cd rewriter drive for $99 why would you not get one?

I think you are being vague as to whether you just want to watch stuff on your computer or you want to record the images.

dvd roms are so well cheap now theres no need for putting a dvd through a capture card really.

does anyone have a tv tuner/vid capture card ? can you recommend a good brand.

Basically I want to be able to record TV shows in MPEG and then burn them onto VCD. But Ive heard converting to VCD can take hours - has anyone done this before ?

sorry one more kinda related question : what hardware/cables etc do i need to be able to hook up my TV to my PC and use that as the monitor?

yes hauppauge is the only brand worth touching as far as im concerned. ive recorded over 200 movies to DVD from sky using my hauppauge pvr-350 card. if you need any moer info of help your welcome to contact me at info@fullspeed.co.nz
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http://aardvark.co.nz has a pc dvr project you might like to look at.

I heard somewhere that you can pick up sky uhf and download a program that decodes it for you

The sky decoer is a little bit buggy.

lifeview is ok but id spend a bit more and go to leadtek which i much prefer software wise - i have no experience with others.

The external usb2 ones are ok too.

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Thanks I'll do that.

Hauppauge are well pricey though.

a simple Leadtek TV2000 winfast tv tuner card will do all of the above for a shade over a hundy bucks, this includes a nice array of software too

Yeah I saw a Hauppauge card advertised for around $600! Ouch.

So with this Leadtek card i can convert the MPEGs into SVCD format and then burn them on to DVD to watch on a standard player ?

I've got a Pinnacle Rave TV something or other... got it about 2-3 years ago... it's great for TV off an outside antenna... sucky off rabbitears... Capture is pretty crappy... tends to crash a bit (this was on win2k, with a pretty decent machine... altho this is probably just the software)... also, it doesn't sync the audio with the video properly, and in long captures it gets *way* out of sync.. I think this was a hardware thing, because I remember trying it under linux and having the same problem.

This was a pretty cheap card.... so I wouldn't recommend going too cheap if you want to do lots of capturing...

i noticed the flyvideo external usb ones had the same problem - ive had no problem with the fly video internal ones tho the software is still a pain.

the drivers for tvcards can have issues under directx9 and you often have to play aruond a bit or download the updates.