What's the Down Low on TV Tuners

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Eagle17

Member
Nov 23, 2001
114
0
0
Let me first clarify your two questions...

first, does a tv tuner card support analog cable inputs? YES

If it is a tv tuner hard and not an HDTV tuner card than you will have no problems with anolog inputs.. the big difference in tv tuner cards these,

1, some cards are PCI and some are AGP (ie. ati all-in-wonder is agp, haupage wintv is pci) and some are USB but those are not "cards". with AGP cards you need to loop your audio back into your soundcard because they can not use the pci bus to transfer this, the PCI cards do not usually have a video out but they do not require a loopback cable either... (most of the time)

2, some cards are stereo and some are analog.. since you can get stereo channels from analog cable make sure your capture card is stereo.

3, chipset. the most popular chipsets for these cards are BT8x8 (ie bt848 for bt878) these are made by a company called conextint or something like that, and used to be made buy a company called brooktrout, hence the BT.

4, tuner the best tuner in my recomendation is make sure it is a phillups...they seem to give the best picture... the ati 8500DV has a tuner on a chip and the picture is horrible...


the second question is output to a tv? it is hard to tell if that is your question.. if it is that would depend on your video card .. I highly recomend any ati video card with a video out... they are simply the best at TV/video...
 
Bateluer

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
I bought the MSI TV Anywhere Tuner from Newegg a while back, but the cable company is leading me around in circles. I want certain channels they do not offer in the baseline packages, and I don't want to pay for one of the advanced packages. :p

The only problem I've found with the MSI card so far is that the Coax input's position on the card makes it difficult to install on some cases. The connector is too thick to easily slide through narrower part at the top of the slot. I had to partially remove my mobo to get the card into the slot. WinXP found and installed the drivers of the CD without a hitch.
 
N

newuser

Senior member
May 31, 2003
360
0
0
OK, thanks for the info.
To clarify my second question. If I have two TV's hooked up, one to the cable outlet and one to my tuner card, is there a difference in the picture
 
ISAslot

ISAslot

Platinum Member
Jan 22, 2001
2,890
108
106
If you're comparing a 'tv -> cable',

and the other set up is 'cable -> tv tuner -> tv', then

unless you have a good tv out, it's gonna look worse.

If you mean the other set up is 'cable -> tv tuner -> on monitor', then

it should look better.
 
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