Tv tuner card...

[ViolentCattle]

I really don't know if anybody can help me do this big decision which is gonna change my entire life...

I already have a graphic card... Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 (TNT2 ULTRA) and I want to buy a Tv-tuner card that's gonna use my old graphic card. (In other word, I don't want a new graphic card with tv-tuner included, I just want the tv-tuner...).

The only on I seem to find info on is the ATI TV Wonder PCI. Is it a good card (cost about 110 CDN) or should I look for something else??? By the way, this card have recording ability too...

Please I need to watch TV on my computer!!! Thanks a lot for any tips you might offer...

[Betamax]

I have a hauppauge tv card and it works like a charm. Even though its rather old now (about 4 years) the company still produce drivers etc.. for it. Heres their website

www.hauppauge.com

[Snu]

For _lots_ of opinions on TV cards, check the AVS "home theater computers" forum at www.avsforum.com . These folks are videophiles, so they tend to be a little picky for my taste. But they are very interested in video quality.

My opinion:

If you have a VCR, you can do well with a plain video input card, without the tuner. That tends to cut down on interference.

I have an ATI TV Wonder VE. It works just fine, but the tuner does have a lot of noise. The Pinnacle Studio card had a nicer picture, but was incompatible with USB (on an IWill KK266).

Try to get a card based on the BT8x8 chip. That way you can ditch the TV viewing program that comes with the card and run DScaler. DScaler is a really impressive free, open source TV viewer/scaler/processor, with lots of ways of doing as much as possible to improve the picture. You can download it from www.deinterlace.com

Incidentally, using a video input card with a Playstation is _the_ best way to play 2D PSX games. You get the perfect compatibility of a real Playstation along with the nice filtering from DScaler. I recently wrote a plugin for DScaler (called "old game") which is designed just for this.

The other really cool video processing program is VirtualDub. It's a bit like DScaler, but doesn't let you watch the video in real time. Instead, it records the video to disk, which lets it do a lot more processing than DScaler can manage in real time. That's no good for video games, but just fine for TV shows. You can get it from http://www186.pair.com/vdub/index

Unfortunately, the ATI TV cards don't work well with VirtualDub at the moment.