TV Tuner

[Frodo Baggins]

I mihgt beinterestedin buying one...if I can findout what they do :)
I'm guessing you can watch TVon your moniter....my question is that is my ATI 8mb vid card enough to support it? (don't be afraid to crrect me if I'mwrong)

[Oni]

it should be fine.

[Frodo Baggins]

What's an okay performer for a cheap price?

[flounder43]

By way of a video card, or a tv tuner?

In both cases I would say ATI: A generic radeon is cheap these days, as is a cheap ATI TV tuner...

[Zuck Gou :)]

Yea my Radeon and TV-Wonder work nicely together.

[Frodo Baggins]

Yes, but I'm wondering if 8 mb of mem is enough for a tv tuner, or would it be wise to go with a geforce 2

[Angry]

Your 8meg card will be just fine as long as it can display 32bit color on the windows 2d desktop.

Its the TV turner that will effect teh quality of your picture.
I have heard good things with teh ATI tuner with ATI cards, but bad things about ATI tuner with nvidia cards.

So your just fine, a friend of mine has a 4 meg ATI card ( donno which one jsu that its shown to be 4 meg) any way his tuner card works fine.

[Frodo Baggins]

k, I spent some time looking around, and the ATI TV Wonder VE looks good and is sold in Ottawa. Any thinig you guys have to say about this>

[BigRed]

ive heard that the drivers suck for the tv wonder espically in win2k

[Frodo Baggins]

http://www.systemlogic.net/reviews/hardware/video/ati/tvwonderve/

Basically, the VE card (the one I'm interested in) has no Stereo TV Tuner and it's Video Compression is VCR-1 only not MPEG-1 like it's big brother...it also has no S-Video Input.

Can someone explain these things to me?
About the vid compression, I want to be able to put files from my vcr into my cpu in a format I can send to my friends, is it possibble with VCR-1 Compression?

And what the heck is the S-Video Input and the Stero TV Tuner?

[lonewolf1983]

i dont know about video compression

but stereo tv tuner means that the sound coming from your tuner is two channels,left and right, instead of a mono sound.
most cheap tv's and video's are mono, and u will most likely not notice the difference

s-video is a new format for connecting devices such as Tv's and DVD players. it offers a sharper and clearer picture
however at the resolutions you will be capturing at i dont think it will be a huge difference

[Frodo Baggins]

I'm okay with the sound. but the S -video input, it won't affect much right? All I need is to be able to watch tv (good picture (like a normal tv)) and to be able to transfer video tapes on to clips. Anyproblems?

[CrystalMethod]

Yeah, that starts comming down to needing a really good setup. If you want to spend the cash get the Radeon All in Wonder. Does everything, you need. Gaming, video ripping, TV tuner, etc...
In general, anything involving video editing, ATI is the way to go. Nvidia is more geared towards graphics and gaming.

[yog]

I just bought the I/O Magic PC PVR package. It was like $30-$40. Don't remember exactly but it seems to be a really good card. I was looking at the same thing earlier but couldn't find anything that I liked. This one is great! The ATI that I tried (Not the VE) didn't playback video right and was hard to set up and never quite worked right. This one was cheaper, does a great job with TV, and can be used like one of those TiVo boxes only on your computer. It pauses live TV, instant replay, recording, all that stuff.

As far as video editing I dont think that it is all that great. I know that it has some great software but it only has a S-Video input on the back. If all youy want to do is edit video and watch TV ATI will probably be OK. It helps to have a fast machine. Mine has a slight hiccup at 900 Mhz! And Lots of Hard Drive Space is a must if you are recording anything in any decent quality. I record a half hour and it takes up 800-900 Mb's. I bought a 80 Gig maxtor drive just for this.

Just my opinion.

[Itchie]

Don't worry if the TV tuner card doesn't support mpeg. You can just capture video in any format you want and then use some small simple program like VirtualDub to convert the captured video to mpeg or asf or whatever format you want.

I bought a TV tuner card about 2 years ago, back when I had a Pentium 1 with a 8 mb pci card, and it worked perfectly. TV Tuner cards aren't very demanding on the cpu or video card.

[Hasufin]

One of my friends has had really good luck with the ATI All-in-Wonder. He says the actual video provided by the card is pretty bad, so you'll want another card (your little 8 meg job should be fine) but the TV tuner portion is the best he's seen (best I've seen, too, but I've not seen nearly as many) and he can capture straight into mpeg. I'd say try and find out what chipset it uses for the TV tuner card and find a card with that chipset.

[KLowD9x]

Ive been using the S-Video input from my RCA Directv, and it looks great! 4 times better than RCA cables and coaxial just sux comapred to S-Video!

[Frodo Baggins]

k, I got the sound and vid working now. The vid looks pretty good, a bit ugly at full screen, but it's all I need. Te sound problem was because of my crap sound card or somethin...weird, but I bought myself a cheap Creative SB Esonique 128. weird though, I tried it out, and now my speakers act like they are burnt out or somethin...won't work all you hear is static and a faint music, bt I tried using directly into headphones and the audio works at least

[SickBoy]

You can adjust the look of the TV with the overlay properties on your video card. There may also be some other way to adjust it.

[FerrariF50]

Ati has a USB Tv tuner the last time I was in compusa it was like $79 or something... It was a red colour.

[bdf24]

Sucks I've got an old WinTV Tuner card. But it's more intel based. And there's in incompatibility with my Asus A7A 266, So it does'nt run in overlay mode. The quality and cpu usage is very bad then. I need a new one as well.