Television on the PC

[Pghpooh]

HI
It's a quiet lazy afternoon here for me so I thought I'd ask some questons.
For 3 years I had a ATI All In Wonder video card in my computer. Sadly it died a few months after the warranty expired!!! I replaced it with a standard Asus video card.
Now I want to get the watch tv feature back on the computer.
My setup has a Asus a7v133 motherboard with a AMD 1200 T-Bird running at 1300 +.
There's 728 meg of ram and 3 hard drives of 80 gig each.
I realize my setup is old and slow. Which means I need a tv card that uses hardware decoding. Most or all cards made by Huappage use hardware decodong. And ATI makes 2.
What I am looking for here is just general info from people who have a tv setup on thier pc. What cards do you use, what software do you use, etc. What about ease of use, and one thing that is important to me now is how easily can you burn a tv show to a dvd and playit on ANY dvd player.
My primary use is to save childrens shows for my grand kids to watch.
Thanks
Pghpooh

 

[pibb]

i used cheap Avermedia TV/FM98 on a 475mhz k6-2 so your system is plenty fast to use cheaper models. I think you confuse the the fact that hardware decoding is only very important if your capturing the video and saving it to a mpeg format in real time. To just watch TV from your PC i'd just go with a cheap PCI tuner around 30-50$.. just my 2cents tho

 

[vapore0n]

if the AIW worked good for you, you could grab a TV wonder. Since your computer is slow you could use an mpeg codec that doesnt use too much resources. Once you install the TV card, try it out and start trying codecs. I think if you use less compression it will use less CPU.

 

[NoBull6]

I use the Hauppauge PVR-350 with hardware encoding. For software I use BeyondTV. It's all VERY easy to use, and the video is smooth and clear (no jerkiness that I've seen on other captured video).

I haven't burnt anything to DVD yet, but I'd be using Nero for that. BeyondTV lets you chose multiple recording quality levels, so you can have some freedom over file size.

I'd recommend both the Hauppauge tuner card and BeyondTV software, as both have worked great for me for the last 8 months.

 

[HombrePequeno]

Hauppage makes really good TV tuner cards. BeyondTV, Sage, and Meedio are all good software to run a good media PC setup.

 

[Pghpooh]

HI
Boy am I getting slow on my replies!!!
Thanks to those who did take the time to reply to my post.
Thanks
Pghpooh