Watch TV on your Computer, How??? Feedback???

[GoodGuy]

I am wondering what is involved in watching TV on your Computer. I have heard of it but am totally in the dark as to how & what's involved. Would you please offer feedback with positives & negatives. Do you have to have a special subscription or can you hook into your local cable provider? Your thoughts? Thanks

 

[Inspector507]

Hauppage makes several products, none of which I've used though. Take a look here . Some are DVR's, some PCI cards, some USB.......

 

[gws]

Get aTV card plug it in and go. I have a TV card, its nice to create a small window int he corner to watch tv, actually just the audio would do. I wouldnt want to make the Computer my only way of watching tv.

 

[DocHeb]

I had an ATI All-in-Wonder card eight years ago that let me watch TV on my computer monitor. All you need is a graphics card with a TV tuner. There is a coaxial port that accepts input from your cable TV coaxial, or runs off a splitter inserted before your cable modem if your running on broadband cable.

 

[anojones]

We did this when we were living in a travel trailer while our house was being built. All you need is a TV source (cable, satellite or antenna) and a TV card (most are PCI and you have to open the computer to put it in- very easy, or some are external and you can plug it into a port on the outside). The TV card will give you an input just like on your TV (coaxial, s-video, composite etc depending on the card) and you just plug in your cablebox or whatever just like you would into your TV. The card will come with software to watch TV on the computer. ATI makes a bunch of cards and you can decide how much to spend- in our case it was as cheap as possible as we knew we wouldn't use it once we were in the house. Worked well for us. We also used the same set-up to convert old VHS videos to digital.

 

[Jagmandave]

The new "Media Center" computers already have one, and the software, built in.......

 

[Holzster]

GoodGuy

For the real easy approch - get a USB Tv Tuner box - works the same as if were an internal card but much easier to set up & run.

I set a couple of these up for customers onmine - they like it.