Can you hook up your cable to a AIW Radeon...

[Spudd]

...and watch cable TV just like that? I have some $$$ to spend on either a new TV or an ATI AIW Radeon 128. I was wondering if I can use my computer and that vid card as a substitute for the TV. Could I just plug the cable from the wall into the vid card and BAMMM, start watching TV? Thanks.

 

[ShotgunSi]

Yup I have a dedicated PC for watching TV on it. Well I really use it to record like a Tivo. Plus it can play mp3's and double as a half way decent gaming machine.

Note: this only works well with Basic cable, which is what I have. Also the ATI AIW Radeon comes with the Guide PLus software which has the tv listings that go forward 7 days.

 

[mangled]

the short answer - yes.

It has a cable connection on the back that you can just screw in to.

 

[NeoMadHatter]

yes, i do it all the time at school. it's really good quality too.

 

[syf3r]

shotgun:

Is your cable feed digital?

Does anyone know of reviews of TV tuner cards that deal specifically with the analog/digital cable issues? I've heard people say that the image on some TV tuners with digital cable is not very good, and/or that the tv-guide software often doesn't work properly with digital cable... Does anyone know about this?

/syf3r

 

[ShotgunSi]

Originally posted by: syf3r
shotgun:

Is your cable feed digital?

Does anyone know of reviews of TV tuner cards that deal specifically with the analog/digital cable issues? I've heard people say that the image on some TV tuners with digital cable is not very good, and/or that the tv-guide software often doesn't work properly with digital cable... Does anyone know about this?

/syf3r

No I do not have Digital Cable. I only have basic cable.

My thinking is that the AIW will work with digital cable, but not completely. Because the AIW has a TV tuner built in, it takes control of the cable signal and can change the channel. My understanding of most Digital Cable is that the black box is used the control the channel, not the TV.
So in otherwords you can feed the signal of the digital cable from the black box to the computer, but you can't change the channels with the computer. Thus the Guide plus software won't work becuase it needs control of the cable signal to change the channel, when you set it to record a certain program at a certain time.
whew
I hope that make sense?

 

[rbV5]

I use my AIW and I have digital cable. The tuner for the AIW cards is like your VCR's tuner, it will tune in the analog channels, but you need to use the digital cable decoder to tune digital cable channels. I hook the digital cable decoder to my AIW via composite video-in, and the analog cable to my AIW tuner. Switch the input in the ATI TV application to watch digital cable (change channels with the decoder's remote) and switch the input to use the AIW's tuner to watch regular analog cable. Works great.

Also, The IQ is excellent from the digital cable, and I've recorded several movies that I've encoded to CDR. You can use the scheduler to record unattended, not as flexable as guide plus, but somehow I've managed over the last couple years to have never used guide plus to record a show.

 

[ShiHao]

rbV5,

How are you able to record a show unattended from the digital cable box?

From my understanding, cable in other parts derives straight from a line with no decoder box involved and a TV tuner like my ATI AIW 8500DV would be able to change the channel. I'm my case in NYC I have just installed a digital cable box and am looking at something to change the channels on the box unattended. I know that the cable box already has something to jump to shows automatically but I would like to see if there's a easier solution on the computer itself. But what about a "cable pack?" This is something I saw in
http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/02q2/020423/index.html this article on SnapStream. When I called SnapStream about their product they said they had a cable box that would change the channels.

Any insights?

Thanks,

Tom T.

 

[rbV5]

How are you able to record a show unattended from the digital cable box?

I usually don't, if I needed to , I'd just leave the cable box on the channel I needed to record and use scheduler. Notice the screen showing the autoscan feature of snapstream...see the 1-125 channels? Looks like analog channels to me..exactly the same as the analog tuner (the silicon tuner on the 8500dv still only addresses analog channels). I don't need my decoder for regular cable channels (unless they are above 125) just like most other cable...just the digital channels. Something to auto change the channels on the cable decoder box would work, for all I know, my box might already support it for recording to a VCR unattended? I dunno, it sure make it nice.