TV Tuner cards - system requirements?

[Mike Gayner]

Howdy folks, I'm looking at getting myself a TV tuner card so I can wtch TV and record motor racing in my bedroom, just wondering what are the system requirements? I have a pretty wussy computer (PIII 450MHz, 256mb RAM and a GeForce 2MX). Will I be able to watch and record videos on my computer? How much space would an average 1 hour video take up? I only have a very small hard disk (12gb, with about 3gb free). The last thing I want to spend money on at the moment is upgrading my specs so if they're not good enough I just won't bother with the TV tuner.

[dansedgli]

Digital or analog?

[parawolf]

You will definately be able to watch TV with a TV Tuner card with that system. As a minimal the analogue TV tuner cards require PCI bus mastering with a reasonable graphics card (you have that).

With recording, depending on content, but as a guideline, HDTV is 9GB/hour

Digital Tuner cards place more on the system... here are the specs from www.digitalnow.com.au

Minimum system requirements for the Fusion HDTV



Fusion HDTV has two modes. The minimum System requirement differently depends on the mode used.

• DxVA mode (GPU-hardware acceleration mode)
CPU : P3 800MHz, AMD Athlon XP 1Ghz (with SSE enabled)
Graphics : ATI Raden7000, 7200,7500 with DDR video memory or
ATI Radeon 8500,9000,9500,9700,9800
nVidia MX420, 440, FX series

• Full Software Mode
CPU : P4 1.8G and above, AMD Athlon XP 1700+ CPU

Pentium M 1.4GHz or faster for notebook PC
Memory : DDR266 and above or RDRAM
Graphics : AGP 4x compatible any VGA card.

[M14A-Mclaren]

I'm guessing analog since digital TV is supplied only by 1 company in NZ,and as far as I know you'd have to have a decoder as well. I have a tuner card and it draws hardly any system resources so I wouldnt be surprised if your computer could run one.

[Mike Gayner]

Okay so an analogue card would pick up TV1, 2, 3 and C4, I can't get Prime where I live. Obviously no Sky so looks like an analogue card is the way to go. Is there any way to compress the video as you record it, so it takes up less space? I'm guessing this would probably use up more system resources than I have, but I wouldn't mind getting a tuner card just so I could watch TV, even if it means I couldn't record. My brother has an awesome computer (AMD 64 3000+, 1gb RAM, 9800xt, I know because I built it but later sold it to him) so if I want to record stuff I could always chuck the card into his beast and record onto his ridiculously large hard disk. We both have TV coax in our rooms.

[M14A-Mclaren]

Thats what I mainly do, watch 1,2,3 and C4 if I record I normally record to mpeg 2 then compress it later with xvid or burn it to dvd, I can get sky on my tv tuner becuase the guy who installed our aerial did some tricky with the cables so you can watch it but only the channel thats been watched on the decoder, so if you have sky I'm guessing a aerial installer could do that for you too if you were interested. Also probably no point getting High def card since the channels are broadcast in HD here, unless you really want to future proof it.

[Mike Gayner]

I'm not too fussed on HD picture and I don't have Sky, so no worries there.