Need help w/ buying TV tuner card

[rufus413]

I'm going to college in about a year and i would like to save space by being able to use my comp monitor as a TV
Things i'd like to do is be able to watch TV, make recordings, and take video from an exteral source (playstation2, VCR) and play it on the monitor... or possibly record from it

I'm not sure if i should buy an internal TV Tuner Card, an external one, or a box thing like this one i found at compusa.

If somebody could give me the pros and cons and possible price for the TV tuner's (i already konw the price for boxthingy) i would really appriciate it

Thx

 

[mschell]

Most any internal tuner card will work fine, I use an old Askey card with an BT 878 encoder and it displays a great picture. The capture application software along with the power of your CPU will deturmine how well you can record video, I like Inter Video Win Coder/WinDVD. Recording lots of hi res video takes a big, preferably seperate hard drive and a 2+GHz cpu for best results.

 

[rufus413]

So, what your saying is there is no difference between what card you use, it being a $20 card or a $150+ card? For some reason i find that alittle hard to believe. Please correct me if i'm taking what your saying the wrong way, i just want to be clear about this.

 

[Kazuo]

That box will possibly be best for viewing. It won't let you record, so you'll need a VCR still. And it doesn't actually have a tuner, so you'll need the VCR for that too.
TV tuner pros:
It allows you to view TV signals and VCR signals using your monitor while also being able to put it into a window so you can use your computer too.
You can also record to your hard disk if your system is fast enough.
TV tuner cons:
You lose a PCI slot, most likely. External solutions tend to be somewhat iffy. Either slow or just poor quality.
You might want to look at the Leadtek TV 2000 XP card, it's really popular. I have one, and I love it. It also allows you to listen to the radio through your computer (and record it to MP3 if need be).

As far as the quality of the video card, that depends on the quality of the PC. Certain cards have hardware to assist it along. The cheaper you go, the less likely it is that the card will have that sort of thing built-in. For example, Pinnacle Studio PCTV is garbage (though less so now that new drivers were released). But if you spend $200ish on a Hauppauge WinTV PVR, you can record DVD-resolution video to your hard drive with a mid-range PC, because it does it for the computer.
Hope that helps

 

[rufus413]

Yah, that helps... now i just have to decide if i want to get a TV tuner card that costs 200ish
Maybe i'll just get the box thingy and a TV tuner card... sure my parents wont mind that much

Thx Kazuo

 

[rbV5]

Look at that leadtek for an addon solution, or an AIW Radeon variant they go ~$80 on up depending on the gaming performance and are well suited for what you want. With $49 1700 tbreds and DDR coming down...you could build a sweet little rig for a pretty reasonable price.

 

[rufus413]

I have a gf4 4200 128MB DDR that i dont think i'm going to be replacing anytime soon (though i wish i had bought it w/ s-video in... i remember looking at the different ones and thinking i'll never use that). I think i'll be looking for a good addon.
i didn't know 1.7 Tbirds had gone down to 49, i need to replace my burnt out 1.2ghz. Do you know any good mobo's that arn't crazy priced... i might need to do that post somewhere else, but if somebody reads this it'd be nice to get a reply. Also any good 17 - 18inch LCD's that are good for gaming

 

[Kazuo]

There's a Biostar mobo that should support the Thoroughbred on Newegg.com for $60. It looks like a fairly decent upgrade board because it allows the use of old stuff and new (standard and DDR SDRAM). Plus it has onboard ethernet, which is nice. I could be wrong about it supporting Thoroughbreds though, you may want to look into that.
The Leadtek card is great. It's about $60 at Newegg.com as well. Decent picture, and I've been able to record 30fps MPEG-2 640x480 with it on my 1.2GHz Athlon.

 

[arswihart]

Do you think the box thing, mentioned in the first post, is better video input/output quality than an ATI all in wonder VE (or any other type of TV-card) for displaying s-video/composite signals from VCR's and game systems?

 

[beatle]

I picked up an Asus TV tuner from newegg a few weeks ago and it is incredible. Captures from a cable/antenna, svideo or composite source, with a breakout box for composite/svideo. Excellent video quality and decent software to boot. Link $79 shipped.

 

[rufus413]

Jeez, i wish i had started posting my problems here earlier... woulda saved me so much time...
thx for the feedback

 

[Bong]

Some of the additional features between TV tuners are the ff:

1. Stereo sound reception

2. Hardware compression video capture ( works better in slower systems )

3. Software bundle

These are some of the things that makes other tuners expensive.