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There are many products available that make your computer seem less like a business tool and more like a home media center. Given this, the one component that may lack the popularity you might expect is the TV tuner card. There are sound cards capable of 8-channel surround sound stereo, high-powered speaker systems, and graphics cards displaying on high definition monitors/televisions.
TV tuners are becoming more common in computers as Windows Media Center Edition grows in popularity, but just about any computer with any operating system can tune in TV. This Tech Tip will look at some of the basics of computer TV tuners, including the interfaces, the technologies, and the performance.
Watching Programs:
The interface with most TV tuners should be familiar to anyone using one, as the manufacturers seem to do their best to make things look and act much like a standard television. Although features will vary from brand to brand, the on-screen display and controls generally look much like a basic television, but now we have the TV inside a window on your computer screen. You can run the TV application in one window, while surfing the web or actually doing some work in another. The size of the screen can be stretched to just about any size to fit your tastes, and most tuners offer the option to go to full-screen mode, where the image will take over the entire screen.
In addition to on-screen controls that can be manipulated with the mouse and keyboard, many TV tuners include a wireless remote control that could easily pass as the remote for a standard TV. This tuner from Geeks.com features such a remote control, and by enlarging the image on that page, you can see that it includes buttons for the basic operation of the TV. Changing channels, adjusting volume, and recording a program are just as easy on your PC as they are with your TV and VCR.
The things you are used to doing on a modern TV can be done here: assigning text tags to channels (i.e., making channel 36 show "ESPN" when selected), adding or deleting channels from the lineup, and so on.
Recording Programs:
The interface for recording on most TV tuners is about as intuitive as that for watching programs. Taking the general functionality of a typical VCR or DVD player, onscreen and remote control based controls make easy work of recording any program.
Image from hauppauge.com
Many tuners take advantage of an online programming resource, such as Titan TV, that make programming your computer to record a show about as easy as operating a personal video recorder (PVR), and generally much easier than operating an actual VCR. Titan TV provides program listings for just about all locations which can be browsed by the user, but more importantly they can be retrieved by the tuner in order to program a recording with ease.
The quality of the recording can be varied with most tuners to allow users to store the files with their preferred balance of audio/video quality, file size, and file format. It may be a process of trial-and-error to find which settings work best with your computer hardware and personal preferences, but the options are generally there. Shows can be recorded in rather basic modes that won't take up too much disk space, in high quality modes that will require better computer hardware and more disk space, as well as many stages in between. It is best to seek out reviews, such as this one , that show what formats and qualities can be expected with specific tuners, as there are many variables that might need to be considered.
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