Hey I have an old PC im planning on turning into a home cinema system. I've been thinking about adding in a TV Tuner card so I can record TV. I've never bought one before and don't have a clue where to start. Can you buy one that will pick up freeveiw channels? Any suggestions would be great Cheers
yep, usb ones can be had for £20ish. Personally I would buy a dual tuner card (internal one) so you can watch one channel and record another. depending on what software you use but some can record channels on a mux, this means you can record BBC1 and BBC2 whilst watching BBC three on one tv tuner card. Such software are free i.e gbpvr, mediaportal and dvbdream etc. On the card front I must admit I'm a little out of touch nowdays but a pinnacle 7010i tuner with balckgold drivers seems to be popular at the moment. Look on the avforums.com for more info.
thanks for the advice. Think i'll just go for one of the usb tuners as im not that fussed about watching and recording at the same time. Normally download shows that I really want to see anyway Cheers!
I don't think I would recommend buying a TV Card given that they (in my opinion) will probably be obsolete in a year or two. The majority of British channels are available online, bbc, ITv, channel 4, channel 5 & Sky, I would probably recommend buying a Apple Tv Box and then installing boxxy..(unsure of the spelling) your able to stream are record tv this way.!
Are you talking about dvb-t2? even so standard def tv should work with dvb-t, I can see it taken a good few years before it becomes an issue, and £20-50 for a few years usage seems like a reasonable cost. It's named boxee and the appletv can only cope upto 720p without hitting issues, your better off with something like a popcorn hour in my view. Although the interface of the apple is better.
Hmm To be honest its not really me thats going to be using it. I'm moving my old PC downstairs and trying to get my parents into this whole internet/PC malarky, and they seemed really keen when I told them they could watch TV on it. I've been trying to teach them for years! The setup needs to be as simple as possible. Any suggestions? I was going to buy a TV tuner card and then have windows media centre startup with the PC so my parents can just use a remote to pick the channels they want. What do you guys think? Would it be easier just to show them how to use on demand sites like iPlayer, 4OD etc.
I think windows media centre would be your best bet, and a cheap tv tuner just make sure you have a good signal. If you want online tv stations maybe zattoo might be good enough for you.
I've a slight worry here with Vista compatibility of some cards still widely available (and at bargain prices); I know Hauppauge never successfully updated the drivers for my old PCI card and Vista Media Centre always crashes if I try to set the card up. With XP you should be OK if future-proofing (to Vista or Win 7) doesn't matter.
Thanks for all your comments, I've decided to go down the Media centre router. Have an XP edition lying around somewhere so should be ok with the TV tuner for recording stuff. Also tried zattoo, quite impressed with it. It's not perfect but my parents can watch ITV now in their spare room so thats them happy! Well thanks to your advice i've managed to get my folks intrested in the tinternet. Woof!
I did this with my parents about a year ago and they love it. Yes it takes a small amount of time to boot (use hibernate it's a lot quicker than booting from scratch), but the fact they can easily record a program without having to faff with video tapes or dvds and can pause live tv when the phone rings means they've really taken to it. They have vista home premium using a compro DVB T100 which has worked faultlessly in vista media centre. I have a leadtek WinFast DTV1000 S which also seemed to work well, however it's not working at the moment, whether that's down to a very poor signal or a faulty card I've not managed to check yet.
