Tv Card

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sparticus

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Hiya ,

I'm looking to buy a TV card for my daughters PC in her room. Her Tv broke and I'll just rather buy her a tv card as she has a 19inch LCD for it. What is a good buy and where ? I'm also looking to record rugby , cartoons and fising programs on her hard drive. Her pc is fairly up tp spec , its a Dual core with a gb of ram and I just bought her a 500gb hard drive so there should be enough space to record.
 
hauppage will not treat you wrong. i would think about a digital card if it falls within budget.
 
See if you can get a Pinnacle card. They are not bad... But like Mier said, make sure the signal processing is done in hardware...
 
all i can advise is that you don't go for winfast's tv2000 xp global, i'm not happy with it at all, serves me right for going the elcheapo route
 
What milomak and mier said, I started out with a cheap software coding card and my system would often crash when trying to use the PVR functionality.
 
Dobee said:
It should say on the box, software processing cards usually don't mention this also you can tell by the chipset or price.
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OK, so these cheap ones http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/product_info.php?cPath=137&products_id=9217?

And why would you go for something more expensive? I see some say FM radio too and things like that. But do they all allow you to plug in your aerial and watch?

Also what about Mnet/DSTV etc? Do you run the aerial from these units to the TV card and then you can watch them?

Sorry, lots of questions but I have also been considering it and it is something I am pretty clueless on as it is something I have not looked into before so don't really know what to look for. :)
 
LancelotSA said:
OK, so these cheap ones http://www.sybaritic.co.za/store/product_info.php?cPath=137&products_id=9217?

And why would you go for something more expensive? I see some say FM radio too and things like that. But do they all allow you to plug in your aerial and watch?

Also what about Mnet/DSTV etc? Do you run the aerial from these units to the TV card and then you can watch them?

Sorry, lots of questions but I have also been considering it and it is something I am pretty clueless on as it is something I have not looked into before so don't really know what to look for. :)
Click to expand...

lol that's the first card I bought btw(software processing), it's not bad but using the PVR/Timeshift function can crash the program... then you end up missing the show you were so closely watching :D

A TV tuner card is just like having another TV, if you have a TV you want to replace just use that cable with your TV tuner and tune the channels.
 
Dobee said:
lol that's the first card I bought btw(software processing), it's not bad but using the PVR/Timeshift function can crash the program... then you end up missing the show you were so closely watching :D

A TV tuner card is just like having another TV, if you have a TV you want to replace just use that cable with your TV tuner and tune the channels.
Click to expand...


mine hasn't caused a crash or anything, it's just the frame rate, looks like it's skipping every 3rd frame or so. it says 25fps on the box, at first i thought thats less than a normal tv, but the other day i read something about multichoices HD PVR doing 25fps
 
Srack0verflow said:
mine hasn't caused a crash or anything, it's just the frame rate, looks like it's skipping every 3rd frame or so. it says 25fps on the box, at first i thought thats less than a normal tv, but the other day i read something about multichoices HD PVR doing 25fps
Click to expand...

My hardware was not as powerful at the time so that could be the reason I had problems with it, but it is a good card for those just curious to try out a TV Tuner without spending much cash.
 
LancelotSA said:
Also what about Mnet/DSTV etc? Do you run the aerial from these units to the TV card and then you can watch them?
Click to expand...

You connect either the component out or rf out from the decoder to the tv card.

Many tv card come with a infrared remote control receiver and a infrared transmitter. You then point the infrared transmitter at the decoder. If you change channels on the pc, it transmits the remote control codes to the decoder that then changes channel. Same thing if you've scheduled some recordings, the infrared transmitter changes to the correct channel on the decoder just before starting to record. Effectively, the tv card is always on one channel and it's the decoder that changes channel.

Of course, when connecting the aerial directly, the tv card will change frequencies to the correct channel as needed.
 
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