Well I suppose so.
So video in and out for just TV stuff?
ATI 9200 is midrange card. Good 2d performance, good colors. Some models have TV-out. I suppose you could get a All-in-one.
I suggest getting a card like the
haugpauge PVR-350...
I don't realy know much about the high-end side of equipment, but I own a PVR-250.
These cards (the nicer 350) have built in MPEG decoder AND MPEG encoder. Do mpeg1 and 2, I beleive. Supports bit rates up to 9.6Mbp/s and 720x480 resolution.
29.97 FPS. You can vary the bitrates. Since this is all hardware encoding then it takes the load off of the CPU.
With my PVR-250 I can encode a 8Mbp/s bitrate Mpeg2 video at 720x480 resolution with something like 10% cpu usage with my 2400+ AMD.
Built in TV tuner. Do the regular cable stuff up up to channel 125 or so. But the regular cable is usually limited to 75. And their are no standards for US digital cable stuff, so you can't realy use it for that.
I don't know how you can do it in Windows, but in Linux I can redirect the output of the card to create a mpeg file easily.
There are other cards that can do that stuff, but with HDTV.... But I haven't played with them.
Can also do composite in and S-video in, i beleive. A nice feature is it can do coax cable out.
However the All-in-Wonder or TV cards like the PVR-350 don't realy strike me as that usefull for actual professional level editing stuff, though.
Most decent video cards have TV-out aviable already, My Nvidia FX card can do VGA analog out, in combination with DVI out or TV out. In my PCI slot I have a 2nd video card that I do TV out on sometimes.
As far as digital video cameras and similar equipment they hook up directly to the Firewire ports and you can play (and control and record stuff in DV tape) them directly to your computer screen.
For instance I hooked up a firewire port for my brother's Sony Handycam. We can plug that into the computer and have software that can play the DV tape directly from the camera and display it on the screen. We can (I beleive) record directly to the DV tape using the camera as the recorder via the firewire port.
I am not familar with professional level stuff to tell you about what to do about getting a card that can do stuff like handle multiple inputs and outputs.
I suspect you can find special cards that can handle multiple high-end and/or propriatory inputs for hooking up to special equipment and whatnot.
But the offerings for special hardware shouldn't be much different for the PC vs the Mac. So if he has some special hardware for input/output he likes it should also be avialbe for the PC.
For sound cards you can find lots of cool stuff. M-audio makes a lot of high end stuff that can do multiple digital inputs and outputs for sound. But I am not familar with high-end digital sound cards to give a recommendation...