TV Tuner Cards

Y

YoMoma

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2005
Messages
201
Been considering buying a tv tuner card. To be able to watch my sports on the pc while I web surf.
Is it easy to use one of these if your working off a wireless pc? My feed is from a cable line/modem in which I get my cable tv from.
I dont want to spend alot on this. I see they easily go over $100. But I have seen some around $50. Are these budget cards worth it?
Do these go in a pci slot?
 
I have a Pinnacle ROB2D- 51009464 4.0

desent card, PCI, good luck finding drivers if you get one.
 
there are a couple of usb cards which is what you would need for a laptop. I have one and it lags quite a lot because the USB can't keep up.
 
With any TV tuner card, you need some sort of direct feed -- from either a cable or an OTA antenna -- in order to use it. Many tuner cards use PCI, though there are a few that use the PCI-E x1 bus. (USB, as kfc469 mention, causes lag and is not a good choice. If you have a laptop, try to find one that runs off of either ExpressCard or PCMCIA.)

I've never used a budget (<$50) card before, so I can't vouch for their performance. In addition to ATI and Pinnacle, Hauppauge also makes good cards (under its WinTV series).
 
You can only get unencrypted feed off of a cable line using a TV Tuner card that supports ClearQAM. If you want to be able to view encrypted channels (HBO, Showtime, etc), you'll need a cable card slot only available through select OEMs (Dell XPS, as an example), along with a cable card from your cable company (if they support it, and they should). I don't think ESPN/TNT is encrypted, but I'm not sure.
 
I see. Thanks guys for letting me know that I need a direct line from my cable box.
 
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