skywalkerman said:
I am just tired of watching tv on my living room. I know it might need a tv tuner card to hook up the satellite TV.but my problem is how? one of my friend said TBS 6981 dual tuner is good. anyone has used it before?
Any advice will be appreciated
I had a TV tuner card in my old PC so I have some experience with this.
The one I had was old though, one of those 100 dollar ones that you would capture in PAL VCD resolution.
After that though I got a video card which had an inbuilt tuner that capture at a res of 640x480. The capturing program converted it straight to MPEG2, but I don't honestly think it was as good as 640x480 should be (seemed a bit blurry, so maybe it was scaling the res up from an original low res signal, I don't know).
Basically if you get a tuner card you basically hook the video signal to the TV tuner device and the audio to your sound card. Then use any capturing software to record to it whatever you want.
Most computers now can directly capture to MPEG1/2 so space shouldn't be a problem (raw capture is absolutely insane).
After you capture you can edit and then export to whatever format you want with the zillions of programs out there to do just that.
Apart from the low-end tuners, there are high end ones that directly encode to MPEG streams in the hardware, and they are very good. I don't think they are necessary though.
Also wanted to point out that my experience is with analog capture cards. If you can get a digital tuner card and have the ability to directly get the digital signal, then you are going to get some very very crisp quality video and it should come out really good.
If its analog it will still be ok, but probably not as good as a digital source stream.